


We held gold dust in our hands

by Amand_r



Series: Gold Dust Universe [1]
Category: Torchwood
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-28
Updated: 2010-10-28
Packaged: 2017-10-12 22:33:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 62,899
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/129849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amand_r/pseuds/Amand_r
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You don't pick your family.  They pick you.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We held gold dust in our hands

**Author's Note:**

> **Ratings:** NC-17 for sexual content (also mild watersports and lactation sex). **Timeline:** AU from pre S1 and threads through both seasons, part of CoE and into THE FUTURE. Enjoy the ride.  
>  **Author's Notes:** Once again, the bastard love child of someone saying something on LJ. This time I don't even remember who it was. ? THAT THE WORLD NEEDED MORE SERIOUSLY POLY POLYAMORY FIC. THIS HAS CURTAINS. This is incredibly indulgent. And ZOMG, THERE'S PORN. AND BABIES. Just trust me. ::cracks knuckles:: Here we go.  
>  **Credits:** Thanks to my midwife, blue_fjords, for the beta, curriejean for the heartening alpha, angstslashhope for the cheerleading and 'shortbussing', and to my lj flist for being honest about themselves and their knowledge of disability. And to joanwilder who taught me about paraplegia and all the medical issues that come with it. And lastly to sthayashi, whose work experience with wheelchairs helped me to get a better handle on spatial relations and just how the chairs work in the world.

We are one body, we are one spirit,  
One breath, one dream of life and death,  
One god, one sex.  
\--(Sophie B. Hawkins, 'We Are One Body')

There is nothing new I could give to you  
Just a life that's torn, waiting to be born.  
\--(Keith Green, 'I Can't Believe It')

IANTO

Torchwood One gives them a huge settlement. They might have insisted that Lisa take retcon, but for Ianto sitting next to her at the big table in the rehabilitation center's conference room (she had pushed the papers across the wood finish and said something unrepeatable); but Ianto is staying on with the organisation, albeit in another place, and so she manages to get out of it. Her useless legs say that they owe her, they owe her so much that money cannot buy, and retcon would be a slap in the face. In the end, Ianto wins with logic and cajoling, and a very flat, level voice that he is startled to discover he possesses after Canary Wharf.

She nervously watches them load her boxes of china into the moving lorry. Ianto has told her not to worry, that he'll take care of everything, but she really would rather do it herself. Not that she can. The chair is fitted to her, made for her, and she hasn't learned how to deal with that yet. She runs into the edges and doorjambs in their small flat, and he can hear her swearing under her breath.

They are never so glad to see the city limits.

'You know,' she says, staring out the window, 'sometimes I think that if we hadn't been married, you wouldn't have stuck around for this.' Her head swivels to him and she blinks in rapid succession. 'I know I might not have.'

'Stop,' he tells her.

'I mean, Jesus, look at how fucked this is.' She slaps her knee, as if she can feel it.

Ianto has to pull the car over on the carriageway then. He reaches over and undoes the buckle of her safety belt, then through a series of awkward movements, and her own pushing with her arms, made stronger by the therapy, he settles her in his lap.

He doesn't know what to say once she is there, her limbs akimbo. Of all of the things she could have said, that is the saddest and most untrue thing. Because until she had said it, he had never thought of it, and he doesn't want to think of it.

So instead, he runs his fingers along her neck and presses his forehead into her shoulder. 'I thought we took a vow. Sickness and health and all that.'

Her eyes scan the passing cars, dancing over each one as it zooms past, processing, processing. 'People say those things because they're standing at the altar, and everything is beautiful. They never mean them for the unforeseeable.'

Ianto sighs into her then, because that's all bollocks, well, not always, but for him. For him it had never been a question, from the moment she had sat down across from him at the cafeteria and said, 'You are incredibly dapper.' He wants her to understand this, but he has no words for it. That is why he had trusted the minister to supply them for him in the first place.

He lets the minister supply them for him now. 'I do,' he says. 'I do, always.'

Lisa rests the back of her head on the window, and he can feel her shoulders shaking, so he lets himself cry, just a little, and then they sob together on the birm, fingers wrapped around each other, until a PC pulls over and knocks on the glass, wondering if they are dead or having a quickie on the front seat.

He makes sure that she is settled, in their flat with its extra wide doorways and lift so large that it accommodates her and shopping bags and a small Audi, whatever she needs; she packs a lunch for him, as a joke, really, puts it in a novelty lunchbox with a picture of Tin Tin on it that she must have scrounged from the vintage kitsch shop next door to their building. Ianto tries to hide it for a second when he arrives at work, but then he knows that the last thing Harkness needs to think is that he is hiding anything. Torchwood One has so many black marks on it, it might as well be made of tar. He looks about the tourist office that he is supposed to attempt to man, and then goes downstairs into the underground Hub to try to make nice with The Monster of Torchwood Three, as Yvonne once called him.

Jack Harkness isn't happy to see him, and Ianto remembers that he has been thrust on the man, in a way. Jack-call-me-Jack frowns as they descend the stairs to the Archives, which look like a bomb has gone off. Probably decades of people running about, grabbing what they needed and then just adding it to a pile instead of returning it.

'We don't get a lot of Torchwood One people here,' Jack says, and what he means is that he doesn't like Ianto.

Ianto runs a finger down the filing cabinet next to him. 'I can see that.' What he means is that he is fully aware that Jack doesn't like him.

Jack leans against the wall and crosses his arms. 'Well, you're cute, and the coffee is good.' He pushes off from the wall and rounds on Ianto. 'Yvonne was a bitch, but she had good hiring sense.' He shrugs and steps behind Ianto, and the lack of sound to his movements makes Ianto jumpy. 'I don't quite care about the Archives enough to hire someone, but if they're sending you, then I guess I'll deal with it.'

What he means by that is his archives had been shown to be a mess when UNIT had needed them. Ianto guesses that Jack doesn't like UNIT breathing down his neck; he can completely sympathise.

'I'll try my best to be as effectively unobtrusive as possible,' he says dryly, turning, and Jack is right _there_. Ianto blinks and starts a little. If this is the way Torchwood Three does things, he is going to have to get better at not being surprised.

Jack reaches out to touch the knot of his tie with one finger, as if it is the button to mastering Ianto, and pressing it will reveal Ianto's dastardly plan. More's the pity that it's just coloured silk, then.

He moves away to start his day, the stacking and shuffling of files an international signal for "Now I shall do my job." Jack seems to understand this, and with a sigh and a warning not to get lost, he leaves him alone.

Ianto notices that Jack has yet to mention Lisa. He had thought that it would be one of the first things out of his mouth; but that might just be because Lisa is _his_ waking thought. He keeps forgetting that she's not everyone else's.

At lunch, Jack raises an eyebrow at Ianto's lunchbox, but when they all sit down at the table to eat, his mouth quirks at the note Lisa has taped to the inside: "Fuck those Cardiff bastards. I love you. XOXO."

Ianto considers Lisa and Jack firmly introduced.

The rest of the group is surly (Owen) and critical (Suzie) and awkward (Tosh). Ianto tries to answer their questions about Torchwood One, about the fires and the daleks and about Lisa, Lisa with her…problems and her chair and her new job working from home for UNIT, back cataloging non secured materials into a massive database, one of those projects that every government organisation says they'll get around to and then never does. Lisa is their man. She says that they owe her. Ianto still isn't sure if she's encoding some sort of worm into the database just to get back at them for mistreating her in the hospital.

Ianto brings coffee, clears take-away boxes and cartons, organises the Tourist Office, and one day is in the middle of 'F' in the Archives when Jack tells him that he wants him to man the Hub when the team is out in the field. Ianto sits at Tosh's desk, Bluetooth in his ear, hands gripping a coffee mug, wondering what he's supposed to be doing when they meet up with trouble, and over the comm he can hear Jack shouting orders; Tosh screams and then Owen is demanding that he hack into things and call up building designs and Suzie is arguing with the local coppers, all at the same time.

He tunes them all out, except for Owen's commands, because that is the only thing he can do anything about, so he misses when Jack tells him that Owen is possessed by some alien being and Ianto gives Owen's alien rider a free pass to the power plant security codes. Jack is furious and there is a scuffle over the comm, ending with gunfire, and Ianto can only sit back in the chair, staring at the screen and wondering if everyone is dead.

When they get back, Owen is bloody and unconscious and Tosh's arm is bandaged and Suzie is too angry to even look at him. Jack sits him down and explains things—this is how we roll in Torchwood Three; there are fewer of us, things are more intense; he's going to have to learn to multitask better. He's going to have to do more than file and fetch tea. He's going to have to be their everything, if he expects Jack to keep him.

'Are we going to have a problem?' Jack ends, cutting the air with a hand that lands on his desk like a meat cleaver on a chopping block.

Ianto thinks of Lisa, and what they've been through, and how Torchwood still owes them, and by extension, Harkness, as Torchwood's leader, is obligated to pay in full. He owes Ianto something, and Ianto will take it in secrets, things that he can take home with him and store in his heart and mind. Sometimes just knowing that his memory is his own, remembering Lisa crushed under the debris, remembering all the therapy and prying the tiles from the shower wall to install the hand rails, remembering that he wouldn't remember these things if he had taken the retcon, is enough. If he doesn't remember these things, then he and Lisa won't know how to confront the raw reality of her chair, of her legs, of the enemas and the stares from little children. On certain days, Lisa holds on to the fact that she had been there when the world almost ended like a badge of honor, and Ianto understands.

He shuffles his feet and shakes his head. 'No, sir, I don't believe we are.'

He can feel Jack's eyes following him all the way out the door. Or maybe just staring at his arse. It's difficult to tell.

He gets better at it. He anticipates their needs, not because he is psychic, but because he watches them. He plays the game of, "If I were Owen, what the hell would I need right this second? Oh, a coffee and a bird." He can help with the coffee. The number of a high priced escort service printed on a sticky note and curved around the belly of the mug is just for pleasure.

Tosh and Suzie treat him well, and seeing as how he had been able to weather the demands of Yvonne Hartmann, Jack Harkness isn't remotely difficult, despite the sexual harassment. Ianto takes to wearing his wedding ring, something that he and Lisa had stopped doing after her fingers had swelled up from using the chair. When she sees that he is wearing the ring again, she teases and crams hers on her finger, and it's not too bad of a fit. And when he tells her that it's to ward off a man, she's doubly intrigued.

'Captain Harkness?' she asks nonchalantly. That kind of nonchalant that she uses when she talks about what she _might_ want for Christmas or her birthday.

Ianto frowns at the salad greens he is chopping. 'Yes,' he bites out, because he doesn't like talking about it. Because it's not precisely something that he's good at parsing right now.

Lisa sets the plates in her lap and wheels out of the kitchen to the dining room. 'He's good looking,' she says, as if she is his yenta. Except for the part where they're _married_. And straight. Well. Sort of.

He tosses the greens in a bowl and turns to face her when she returns. Lisa's face is knotted in the expression she uses when she doesn't think anyone is looking—brows drawn together, scowling, mouth drawn in an angry line. It makes Ianto uncomfortable; he's done enough that she doesn't have the look all the time, but he senses that instead of feeling better, she's just learned not to show it to anyone.

'He's terribly inappropriate,' he tells her, hoping to tease a smile out of her. He'll even tell her about today's special innuendo, the one about the chipolata.

Instead, her lips curve upward and she gives him the look.

He likes the look, on the rare occasions that he understands what it means.

It goes on like this for a few months, maybe two, before Owen settles down and stops making jokes about Ianto being a Cyberman underneath, a comment that Tosh seems to find particularly offensive on his behalf. Suzie finally relinquishes her death grip on the care and feeding of the SUV, and then Ianto catches the dinosaur and he's officially one of them.

It's Lisa's idea, really, the chocolate, as they lie in bed one night, and he tells her about how they'd chased the thing all over Cardiff, trying not to look like they were scanning the skies, and cringing every time a civilian had looked up and said, 'Is that a dinosaur?' Jack has been going mad with frustration, loading all of the tranquilizer guns in the back of the SUV and roaring at them about being professionals and goddammit, what were they all? Twelve? That they couldn't catch a giant flying lizard.

So in an attempt to make the team like him instead of merely tolerate him, Ianto foolishly goes out into the Cardiff night alone, searching for a creature from the lost land. Trapping her in the warehouse isn't difficult so much as it is shite-luck, but he tries to make it seem more complicated than it had been as he excitedly calls Jack on his comm in the middle of the night, back pressed against the door of the warehouse as the dinosaur screams inside.

Jack makes it there in record time. Ianto doesn't quite know what to make of his boss, except that he's fit and funny and demanding and angry, though what Jack is angry about is usually never what he's pretending to be angry about. He's not angry now so much as amused, and after he makes a few jokes about Torchwood One being prepared like Satanic boy scouts and asking Ianto if he knows how to tie any _knots_ , they dive inside.

Chocolate and a tranquiliser gun had been his plan. It had sounded a lot less insane when he and Lisa had been tipsy in bed the night before. But now Jack has a huge needle and all his jokes are gone when they circle the dinosaur, Ianto waving a very expensive bar of dark chocolate and mumbling what Lisa had told him about serotonin levels. Some days he wonders if she is trying to get rid of him, a sobering thought.

Jack manages to get _on_ the dinosaur, or rather, to grab on when it takes flight, and Ianto can only stand there and helplessly watch as the creature takes him on a wild ride through the warehouse. He is composing the obituary in his head. He is imagining the taste of the retcon that Torchwood will give him for killing his boss. _Death by dinosaur._ No one remembers what retcon tastes like because no one remembers they've taken it, he realises, when Jack falls towards him and he foolishly holds out his arms as if he can catch the man.

He does, and they roll, and the dinosaur, no, pterodactyl, no, pteranodon, reacts to the sedative Jack shoots her with finally and lands right next to them. Or rather where they would have been if they hadn't rolled at the last minute. Ianto huffs into Jack's face as he lies on top of him, eyes wide, shaking. Underneath him, Jack is limp, neck a little arched, the definition of a come on. Ianto has fifteen dictionaries; he's sure that in every one of them, under 'seduction', is a picture of Jack Harkness's face right now.

'Well now,' Jack says, his voice throaty. 'That was bracing.' He shifts minutely under Ianto's weight, and it feels a little too much like how pornos start.

Ianto pushes himself off of Jack and blushes. His pulse pushes against the gold band on his finger.

Jack props himself up on his elbows, looks over at the sleeping dinosaur and back to Ianto before bursting into laughter. 'Oh Mister Jones, I am _so_ keeping you.'

'I should hope so,' Ianto huffs. 'I caught your fucking dinosaur.'

Jack rises and stuffs his hands in his pockets. Ianto knows that he's wide open for a remark about dinosaurs and sex, but it never comes. In fact, when he looks back at Jack, the man's head is cocked and he's staring at him, much like he had on Ianto's first day.

'Go home,' he says finally, scuffing a foot and pivoting away. 'Kiss that genius wife of yours.'

*~*~*~*~*~*

LISA

It's the flowers that bother her the most, she realises when she's staring at the wallpaper in the loo. If they owned this place, they'd be gone already. Hell, if she could reach the upper walls with a steamer, it'd be gone regardless.

Lisa finds that in the day to day of her life in Cardiff, the futility of the flowered wallpaper in the loo is endemic to her entire situation. Flowers, bright and red and meant to weave together in a happy pattern, meant to subconsciously cheer her up as she lathers up or washes her hands, or uses the Peristeen. Instead, she often finds that she lavishes quite a bit of animosity at them in their insistence toward joviality.

She hasn't mentioned this to Ianto, because he would rip them all down for her in an instant, and that's not exactly what she wants.

But they are there every day, and as she cleans her catheter in the sink and listens to the chiming of her instant messenger program pinging repeatedly (she tells them that she'll be back in fifteen minutes, but they never seem to notice. UNIT is full of people who only read the lines they themselves have written in any given chat room.), they begin to seem less and less like a nuisance and more like a mockery. The more they want her to be happy, the more irritated she gets.

She wheels out into the hallway and bangs the chair on the doorjamb, because no matter how many times she does it, she always misjudges this turn.

By the time she's back at her workstation in her office, a bottle of Perrier, bag of carrots and a sausage roll wedged in between her legs and the side of the chair, there are fifteen new emails and about fifty lines of chat text, none of it pertinent to her. She deletes the emails with her mouse, saying, "click" as she erases each one. She has several emails in her inbox from Torchwood, which means that she's either finally managed to get a hold of Toshiko Sato, or Ianto has a rare moment at a borrowed terminal.

 **From: Jones, Ianto.  
Subject: An Unexpected Outing?**

 _Lis-- I have a few minutes to spare and I wanted to mail and ask if you had any plans for dinner. Jack has given me the evening free, and I intend to not be near any form of communicative device in that space of time. Do you have anything in particular you might fancy? I might be able to persuade Tosh to hack a reservation for us if somewhere you like is full up, and bugger the consequences. We deserve nice flatware once in a while. Love you tragically hip, Ianto_

Lisa smiles and hits Reply.

 _Babe—I don't have anything that I'm thinking I need desperately, actually, and you're the one who knows the Food section, so pick someplace that has those little snail forks and a fish knife and maybe pate or something that still has a head on it. All those posh places leave the heads on. What did you have to do to get the night off? Blow Mount Harkness? Haahhha. Love you tonnes and tonnes and rubber nuns, Lis._

Lisa looks at the dress that has just come back from the dry cleaners and which has been hanging in its plastic bag on the doorknob of the office closet since it had been delivered that afternoon. It is gold and sparkles in the right places and is low cut in the front and high cut up the legs, and she wants to wear it when Ianto makes love to her, but he won't let her, so she'll settle for wearing it tonight.

 **From: Harkness, Jack.  
Subject: Re: A request, please sir!**

 _Ms. Hallet-Jones,_

Fine, you sly minx. He's all yours for the evening. Just let him return in one piece; he's the only one who knows how to run that shiny coffee machine we bought last month.

J.

p.s. Fwd pictures. :)

Lisa smiles. She has never met Captain Harkness, but that doesn't mean that she has any hesitation emailing him and demanding that he give Ianto an evening without distraction in which he can sex up his wife right and proper. She might have even mentioned that in her initial email; just because she hasn't met the man doesn't mean that she doesn't _know_ the man.

 _'Click. Click. Click.'_

NEW **From: Jones, Ianto.  
Subject: Re: Re: An Unexpected Outing?**

 _O_o. If I knew I'd tell you. Let's not look a gift horse, eh?_

Seven at Le Tagliatelle. They have breadsticks for fencing. XO –Ianto

Lisa hits "Archive".

Ianto breezes in at six-thirty, makes for the bedroom at breakneck speed, peeling off his clothes as he goes. Lisa spies his bluetooth on the sofa and places it on the counter for safekeeping. His tie is in the hallway. She retrieves it and his dress shirt, tossed over the footboard of the bed. His trousers are slung loosely at the waist, and he's doing that hunched over thing so that they don't fall down as he pulls on the new shirt, talking a mile a minute.

'—so then I had to requisition close to three hundred of them and there's no way they're going to get here in time. Suzie set the kitchen on fire trying to blowtorch one of those wretched Hot Pocket things and I don't even want to think about what's in them. I think I managed to get most of the cheese off everything, but it all smells like the day after a fire in the chem lab. And Tosh, well, you know Tosh, she started coughing and wheezing and Jack had to take her out for air. So that left me in the Hub with Owen and Suzie, and they're at it like, I don't even know what they're like. Do you think blue?'

Lisa tilts her head at the selection of ties in his hands. The shirt is gray. The suit is blue. The tie is a different shade of them both in stripes. She nods and he tosses the others he's had on the back burner of his mind back into the wardrobe and slings the tie around his neck before tucking in his shirttails and doing up his trousers.

'Excellent. So, I was standing there with my hands full of rags and chopped processed ham and Jack comes out of nowhere and says, "Yantoe, take the evening off."' Ianto does a great bad American accent, Lisa thinks. She loves when he says his own name. Ianto leans against the wall as he ties his tie, fingers moving with almost preternatural speed. 'I wasn't about to ask _any_ questions, mind you. Jack's—well, he's—what?'

Lisa realises that she's been shaking her head. 'How much coffee have you had?'

Ianto glares at his tie in the mirror. It's horribly long on the wrong end and his hands are a little shaky. He gives her an innocent grin. They have discussed this—Ianto and coffee is a love affair that if left unchecked will lead to ulcers and two a.m. hyperactivity. Lisa would threaten to lock up the grinder if she wasn't so sure that Ianto knows how to use their local Starbucks.

'Too much.' He fixes his tie and sits on the edge of the bed so that she can wheel to him and they face each other. He places both hands on her thighs and leans in for a kiss, which is sweet. Lisa can taste the coffee and something minty, as if he has brushed his teeth in the car. Again. 'You look fantastically incredible.' He raises an eyebrow. 'Edible.'

She smirks. 'Spreadable?'

He slaps her hands and stands when she backs up. 'Most inevitable.'

She leads the way to the door, stopping only to gather her coat and purse. Ianto won't have his mobile, but she'll have hers. Torchwood can always reach him that way, but it will be considerably more inconvenient. She likes to inconvenience Torchwood.

'You're driving,' she jokes on their way out the door. Ianto almost runs into her chair when they stop at the lifts.

Later, in the quiet of the restaurant, after Ianto has decaffeinated somewhat and they have stuffed themselves with a series of Italian dishes that they ordered solely because they hadn't understood what they were, Lisa sips her wine and sits back in her chair.

'So, this whole Torchwood Cardiff thing,' she begins. 'We said we'd give it three months. Those three months are up. Where do we stand?'

There is a long stretch, and she knows that he has been thinking about it, and that now he has to process everything he thinks and feels about the situation in his head and lay it out for her. Even as he wipes his mouth with the serviette and lays it over his plate (so he doesn't have to look at his uneaten food. It's one of many truly amusing quirks about him.), even as he turns and waves a finger, probably for the pudding trolley, his brain is tabulating, composing, weighing word choices and all but spellchecking his list. She imagines Ianto's communication process partly in Word, partly in Excel. It is hard to tell which. Oh hell, Ianto runs on Linux.

Finally, after the tray is gone and they have a piece of tiramisu in front of them that is big enough to feed a small third world country, he toys with his pudding fork. 'It…it isn't unpleasant,' is what he comes up with. Lisa can hear the click of the 'enter' key in his voice.

'And?'

Ianto smiles. 'They're quite disorganised.' As if on cue, a garcon drops a tray of dishes and they both snort.

'Then you have plenty to keep you busy.'

'They're not as…fun.' He says, and what he means is that they aren't friends. He doesn't want to say that, she knows, because he doesn't want them to get close. Getting close had been one of many little downfalls in a way, and they had both agreed on that when they had come to Cardiff. But Lisa is tired of staring at the same old flat, the same old café, and the same old bus that takes her to her occasional UNIT meetings.

'It has to be better than working for Yvonne, though,' she says smoothly. She wants him to break down everyone for her so that she can pick her strategy.

Ianto sips from his glass before he says anything. 'Jack Harkness is a good man. Not always a wise man, but a good man.'

Lisa smiles. 'All right then.' She plays with her serviette ring. 'You should have them over for dinner.'

The wine glass thunks down and he looks away. 'They're my co-workers,' he mumbles.

Lisa leans forward, even though she has no intention of whispering. She spears the tiramisu with one silver painted nail and scoops out part of the center. 'So were Kyle and Sarah and Simran. Most of our friends were co-workers.' It's the Torchwood way, actually, since they couldn't tell anyone outside Torchwood what they do. The hours were always shite, Lisa and Ianto had found themselves thrown in with the lot of them. Unfortunately, every person she could name is dead. She doesn't want to remind him of that. She doesn't need to. They were lucky to both come out of it, actually. An anomaly.

She licks her finger clean. Ianto tests the pastry with his fork like a civilised man. She doesn't like the tiramisu—too much coffee liqueur.

'You'd hate Owen,' he says finally, raising one eyebrow in his 'judgmental Bond' way.

Lisa laughs then. He's adorable when he's trying to dissuade her. 'You let me deal with Dr Harper.'

'And then there's Suzie, she's alright, and you'll love Tosh.' _You'll_. It's settled then, almost wrapped in foil and ready to pop into the oven.

Lisa can sense a but coming. 'And Jack?'

Ianto finishes his wine. 'It's a good thing we're married,' is all he replies. Lisa shakes her head. Her silly boy.

'Take me home and remind me why we're married,' she tells him then, reaching over the table to touch his hand, because what she especially wants to do—give him a footjob under the table, is no longer an option. That stings less than it might have before.

Later, they collapse on the sofa and watch a film. It's a ridiculous film, something they ordered through the mailing service because they'd been drunk and going through the queue. Lisa reflects that they should never do that again. On the other hand, drunken video renting had got him to propose to her (over a very bad film about zombie pharaohs, no less), so it might not be all bad in moderation.

Ianto looks away when her hand snakes to his lap whilst they sit on the sofa. His lower lip catches in his teeth and he glances from the telly to stare out the window, as if the film bores him and he hasn't noticed that she is unzipping his trousers.

Any other time, she might have said something, might have turned his face about to say, "I'm right here," but she doesn't bother. They've had sex three times since it happened. _By fucking god_ they are doing it tonight.

Ianto brings his head around to her and they gravitate closer and closer until she can feel his breath hot on her face. This is that cute awkward first time kissing that she likes, that he likes, really, with the butterflies in the stomach, waiting for the other person to zero in and, _oh_. She grazes his lips with hers, rubbing for a second before opening her mouth to his, and then school is out, and his hand finds the back of her neck, pulling her closer as the kiss deepens and she can close her eyes and just be Lisa Hallet-Jones, in love with Ianto Jones, and married and safe and together and—

Ianto breaks the kiss with a twist of his mouth, like turning a honey jar up and to the side to stop the flow, and he makes a natural progression to her neck, his hands sliding across her shoulders, her back, the gold scales of her dress. She inhales the scent of his hair and can feel him smile into her neck. 'Love the dress.'

He doesn't see her lift her eyebrow, but she knows he knows she does it anyway. 'It looks better on the bedroom floor,' she assures him, her fingers playing on his tie, the nape of his neck. They aren't kissing anymore, just pressed close, too close to see each other's faces, and that's nice, yeah, intimacy. Lisa doesn't have to see his face to know that he wants her. He's hard and ready and she can feel her breasts aching against him, against the fabric of the dress that she didn't wear a bra under, and she wants him to discover that himself, if he doesn't know it already.

She misses the way his face would light up, and he would reach out with both hands; he would smile and say with appreciation, "Oh, yeah, Lis. _Yeah_."

She won't let him carry her into the room, like she might have long ago, because then they leave the chair behind, and without it she is effectively stranded until she can drag herself into it. Instead, Ianto settles her in the chair himself, and then pushes it. He very rarely pushes the chair, mostly because she won't let him, and so it means something when he does.

Lisa deposits herself on the bed and he watches her inch her way back with her hands, his face shadowed with something that means that he is starting to think logistics and not fucking.

The mood of earlier is slipping away, and Lisa doesn't understand how it always flees. She has tried to carry it here, that playfulness, but it always seems to get lost on the way to the bedroom. He pulls the dress over her head where in the past she would have let it slide off her shoulders to pool around her feet on the floor. He tosses his clothes over the bedroom chair with nary a look back. She pulls herself further back on the bed and whistles when he takes his time with his shorts, rolling his hips for her a little, stripping for her, his lower lip tucked in between his teeth, his thumbs hooking disastrous on the waistband. She reclines a bit, tries to make her legs fall in what looks like an inviting way without being overly crass, but she doesn't want to have to actually manually arrange them herself.

Ianto throws his shorts at her and she laughs when they smack her in the face. 'Oh fuck all romance,' she mutters.

'They have hearts on them,' he offers with a feeble smile as he crawls to her on the bed and settles in the v of her legs. His eyes move over her body and she takes a moment to remember that once upon a time she had been lithe and flexible and silky. He accommodates her want for his skin by coming closer, almost pressing into her chest, and then she is flat on her back, arms around his waist, his neck, and finally, _finally_ , her hands are around his cock, and then there's the snap of the condom going on.

Ianto lowers himself onto her, his kisses gentle and not deep enough, and she wonders when he will just do it. He lubricates her using his fingers and slides in, hitching her legs at the knees and holding them up, or they just flop to the sides. With his hands holding her that way, he cannot touch the rest of her, and she pinches her own nipples when she watches him thrust in her, watching, because it is much like seeing two people on the telly having sex. Her body jerks with the rhythm of the thrusts and she moves herself with her arms, pushing against the wall behind her for something to leverage off of, but it is awkward and she needs both hands, and when she lets go of her breasts to do it, Ianto says, 'No, let me do this.'

Sometimes, when they fuck, and they have not done it enough for her to tell, but she has been wanking like a pro for the past two months, sometimes she thinks she feels something down there. In those moments everything is a pinpoint of perceived sensation that she is desperate to feel, like freezing in the dark to hear better.

Even now, she hitches her breath and closes her eyes, arching her torso as much as she can to change the position, to 'hear' the rhythm of her body, to feel what she knows must be there, down there she is wet and ready. Everything she used to feel is still there, and like a shorted wire, maybe if she twists the right way she can short the circuit again, just for a second, and feel him in her, thrusting, the hardness of his cock, his balls hitting her in rhythm, his hands on her thighs.

There is. It's so very far away, though, that she isn't sure if she's imagining it or if it's real. Sometimes with the vibrator it feels real. Sometimes when he looks at her over the sheets or at the table or in the shower, she can feel it. She wonders if she comes then. The overall sensation is not unlike wondering what an orgasm would feel like before she'd ever had one.

Ianto's hips stutter, he shudders for a second and then stops. 'Shit,' he whispers, and she can hear the rasp in his voice. 'Shit Lis, I—'

She would sigh if she didn't know how damaging it would be. In truth, it hadn't been where she thought it would be either. He avoids falling on her, catching himself with his hands before rolling off. She hears him slide the condom off his softening cock and throw it in the bin next to the bed. They used to call that the 'smexy bin'. Not so much lately.

She lets her legs fall wherever they happen to be and doesn't care really, if her hips aren't aligned. Instead, Ianto presses his face to her shoulder, slinging one arm around her waist—she can still feel that, at least—and shakes his head. She raises one hand to card his hair, temples dewy with the beginnings of sweat.

'I'm so sorry,' he mumbles, and she wants to stop him before he can continue.

'It will happen,' she says resolutely, because that is what the therapist had told her, and what the physical therapist had told her when she had asked about sex, Ianto's hand loosely gripping hers when they had sat in the office. 'We can do this again.'

Ianto just nods and pulls her closer, but his face is drawn and his eyes are closed. She doesn't reach up to touch the wetness on his cheek, because it's enough to know that it is there.

*~*~*~*~*~*

IANTO

Jack seems lonely, actually, in the way that his smile never reaches his eyes, and when Ianto invites him home, for dinner, dinner only, he shakes his head and says something about the Missus. Ianto is fairly sure that Lisa and Jack will end up ganging up on him about everything, from his coffee habits to his suits to the way he folds his serviette after dinner and lays it across his plate so that he doesn't have to look at the uneaten food. But he pushes, because that look is the one thing that he cannot cure during hours, and he hates not being able to fix things that should be so easily fixable.

Jack lets Lisa take his coat and his eyes track her chair as she wheels through the room. Ianto can tell that she is a novelty, not because of the chair, but because of what she represents—damaged Torchwood goods, the possible future for any of the people under his command. He sits stiffly at their table for the first few minutes until Lisa lets her tongue curl about the fork in that way she has, and just the innuendo of it softens his spine, as if sex is a land in which Jack is king, and he can move in that familiar territory.

He's on his best behaviour, actually. Ianto has never seen him eat so neatly or calmly, even when he and Ianto are telling humourous Torchwood stories. No slamming hands on the table in glee, no pronouncements of needing to pee, not one mention of Owen's current fetish with alien orgasm. Lisa smiles when Jack compliments her chicken, and her--Ianto looks down at his plate--whatever this is. Potatoes? Turnips? It's difficult to tell.

Jack relaxes sometime around pudding. Well, relaxes enough that he laughs that whole loud laugh at something Lisa says about UNIT and their need for unnecessary colour coding. They have a wink and a chuckle about the relative 'deliciousness' of Colonel Storr, and Lisa pats Ianto's hand absently, perhaps to assure him against jealousy that he doesn't feel. Her earrings swing under her ears, caress her neck, and Ianto wonders why he has never noticed them before. Jack has a suspicious familiarity with Lisa that makes Ianto wonder, for a split second, if they've spoken before; _that_ makes something stir in his stomach, but he doesn't quite have a word for it.

Ianto makes coffee, and they linger over it, as if they are dancing around something, really, some two step that doesn't have a form, but consists of a lazy shuffle-sway across the floor. He likes the casual nature of it, anyway. Lisa is gorgeous and limp, relaxed, in a way she hasn't been around the sparse company they keep for a long while.

He is vaguely disappointed when Jack pulls his serviette from his lap and sets it on the table in an impromptu triangle. 'Lisa, that was lovely,' he says, like some sort of movie gentleman, which he is most assuredly not. Ianto wonders where Jack gets his lines sometimes.

Lisa snort-laughs and Jack raises his hands. 'No really. I live on take away and my own cooking. It's nice to have something that doesn't taste like an MRE.'

Ianto stands, and so he barely sees Lisa's eyes dance, and she folds her hands on the table in front of her, leaning on the wood. Ianto gathers the pudding plates to take to the kitchen. Jack's eyes fix on his, and then they travel the line of his tie, a gaze that three months ago would have made Ianto blush but now seems less and less improper.

He's stacking the dishes in the sink for a proper soak later when Lisa sets her cup down in her saucer with a clipped sound, the sound of someone being deliberately gentle.

'Jack,' she says suddenly, 'I asked you here for a favour.' Ianto glances up at the two of them sitting across from one another.

Jack's eyes cloud, and he nods, as if he understands what she wants without saying it, but he waits for her to say it, which is a blessing, because Ianto doesn't know what the fuck is going on.

'I knew it,' Jack says lightly, 'I knew it. No one asks me to dinner unless they want something.' He smiles. 'Ianto has a week of holiday time accrued. Where are you planning to go?'

Lisa leans back in her chair, elbows resting just above the wheels. From this view they seem like extensions of her body, cogs that propel her through their flat, through the world. She tilts her head. 'I want you to come to bed with us.'

Ianto drops the plate and it lands on the countertop with a heavy clunk.

Jack leans back in _his_ chair, steepling his fingers in front of his mouth, his elbows heavy on the arms. If Ianto had to guess, he would say that Jack is surprised. 'Ah.'

'I ask,' Lisa continues, her face just a little red, and Ianto wonders if she has thought this through beyond that blurted remark. Maybe that wasn't what she had intended to say. Maybe she had meant to ask Jack to move some furniture or actually give Ianto time off.

It's just as likely that she meant to ask Jack to give her a job, or to help her do the cha-cha.

'I ask,' Lisa starts again, 'Because you are an attractive man, as you are well aware.' And here she pauses, waiting for Jack's half-smile, indulging it when it comes, like a panto artist allowing time for the audience to laugh before finishing their line. 'And I think we could have a lovely evening.' Her hands unclasp at her waist and one of them waves. 'Ianto will deny it, but he's curious.'

Jack's eyes flash at him, and Ianto busies himself putting the rest of the dishes in the sink. The blue rims of the plates are suddenly fascinating—there's one that has a crack in the glaze and he wonders idly if he shouldn't throw it out, what with bacteria and all collecting in microcracks. He's only pretending not to listen though; they both have to be insane to think that he's not hanging on every morpheme.

'Is he now?' Jack drawls, and he has that same smugness that he uses when he's warned Owen about something only to be ignored and then proven correct when there's rotten arterial bloodspray. 'I have to admit that I've thought about it. At inappropriate junctures.'

Ianto rolls his eyes then. 'There can't ever be an appropriate juncture for this,' he grates out.

Jack ignores him, looking back at Lisa. 'I take it you haven't discussed this.'

Lisa laughs. 'No time like the present, yeah?' and what she means, Ianto knows, is, 'Do it before I lose my nerve.'

Jack stands then, shoving away from the table; the screech of the chair feet on the floor is loud and reminds Ianto of scraping fingernails on a chalkboard. He's leaning against the countertop in the kitchen, trying to find things to do with his hands. Lisa smiles at them both, her head moving back and forth, and Ianto wonders if he is over-caffeinated, his heart is beating so rapidly.

This couldn't be what she meant earlier, before he'd brought Jack home, when she'd vaguely reminded him that Torchwood owed them, owed them both.

Jack slides his braces down, and it's pornographic in and of itself, without the loss of clothing. Lisa smiles and twirls her fork in her fingertips. Ianto remembers that sometimes people need air inside their lungs to survive and takes a breath, standing mutely when Jack rounds the table to kneel in front of Lisa. She leans towards him minutely and then they both look at Ianto.

'I'm going to kiss your wife,' Jack says factually, but it's a request more than anything, and Ianto can only give the barest of nods. The briefest of flashes goes through his mind—Torchwood took half of her away from him at Canary Wharf, and now it was going to take the rest of her as well, grabbing with Jack's large hands and pulling her away, but that is uncharitable. Lisa is a grown woman, he realises, when he watches Jack lay the barest of kisses on her lips before nibbling at the edges of her mouth and suddenly plunging into her.

Lisa holds Jack's face in her own hands and she works against him, head bobbing contretemps with Jack's until they pull away, breathless, eyes faintly glassy. And then they turn their faces to him.

Oh.

Lisa raises one hand from Jack to beckon to him, her nail polish glinting red in the light. He starts to take a step before the absurdity, the insult of it all invades him. 'No wait—' he begins. She's his _wife_.

Jack recoils slightly, as if the slightest protest of his actions from Ianto will retract him from the situation completely, hands off, face pulling from Lisa's grasp. Ianto is reminded of the moment in the film when the hero surrenders his firearm to save a hostage.

Lisa's eyes hold the smile on her face, and he knows that look. It's her birthday face.

Ianto unclenches his hands and crosses the room, unsure of what he's going to do when he gets there, but that makes it all the more surprising when he leans down without thought, without hesitation and takes Jack's mouth with his. It's warm, and has that faint lingering taste of coffee, and dear god, he thinks as he forces his tongue in, can Jack kiss, why had that never occurred to him before? He almost loses his balance when Jack's hands come up to steady him a little, and one of Ianto's hands rests on Lisa's chair, on the wheel, the rubber of the tyre stuttering under his sliding grip.

It's better, then, when Jack breaks off the kiss and presses his lips to Ianto's cheek, pulling gently on the back of his neck so that Ianto can lower himself to the floor gently, turning Lisa's chair so that she faces Ianto, and he has to shift only slightly to find her mouth. Lisa isn't as warm, but her lips are so familiar, lush almost, softer than Jack's. It occurs to him for a split second, when something clicks in his head, that this is some sort of milestone he will want to remember later.

Lisa's hands reach up to undo his tie, the soft sound of silk rather calming, and Jack's fingers move around to unbutton his shirt, and Ianto wonders when he became the birthday gift, if it's even logical to feel that way. Lisa breaks the kiss and pulls the fabric free, folding it and setting it on the table, but it's more an excuse for her to look him in the eye whilst Jack is behind him, fingers slipping inside his shirt to tug on his chest hair. He can feel Jack's breath on the back of his neck, and Lisa's eyes ask him if he is all right with the thing that she's done. Ianto senses that even if he isn't it would be too late. Eggs cannot be unfried, a glass cannot be unbroken, and they couldn't put this back in the box and return it even if they knew where it had come from.

More importantly, it doesn't matter, he thinks as he leans back into Jack so that Jack can slide his hands down Ianto's chest whilst Lisa gathers Ianto's wrists in her lap to undo his cufflinks and place them on the table next to his tie. When that is done, Ianto finds that he doesn't miss his shirt, but he does want to undress them both, slowly, methodically, almost scientifically. He suggests they move to the bedroom, and they do, Ianto following Lisa's wheelchair, only glancing back once to check that Jack is right behind him, even though he is holding the man's hand in one of his own.

Lisa won't let him help, won't let either of them help, actually, lifting herself to the edge of the bed. Jack watches with interest as Ianto pulls her blouse off and tosses it into the corner, and she wiggles her skirt free with her hands whilst Ianto turns to Jack and sets about unpeeling Jack.

Jack is smooth and radiates heat. His skin is shades darker than Ianto's when they are both visible in the mirror, some sort of mix between him and Lisa, whose bra glows white in the dim lights from the hallway and the street. Ianto watches her lick her fingers and then inch back with her hands on the bed; it is impossible to fail to see the drag of her legs, how they don't move, but instead of dwelling on them, he closes his eyes and slides off his trousers, for once just letting them fall wherever, because it seems right for this occasion, indulgent.

Jack has been eerily silent. Ianto isn't sure why that might be, but when he feels the man come up behind him, he is completely naked, and he can barely turn before they tumble onto the bed, bouncing with it, and Jack's grunt on landing is more like a laugh, infinitely amused, that one. Lisa's chuckle is throaty, and Ianto, trapped under the weight of Jack and his, oh hullo, erection, can only reach out a hand to her, pulling himself out from under Jack minutely before he has to close his eyes again as Jack's mouth finds his chest.

'How do you want to do this?' Jack asks finally, pressing feather kisses on Ianto's belly. Ianto shares a look with Lisa, and as she props herself up with one hand and undoes the clasp of her bra with the other, her eyes darken and her brows knit; Ianto is glad that he isn't the only confused one here.

'I don't think we thought this far,' Lisa admits unabashedly. Ianto reaches out to cup her breast when the bra falls away from it, brushing his thumb over the nipple until it stands up for him. Small things, like the hardness that forms there at the mere brushing of his hand—these are small triumphs, no matter how involuntary. _Because_ they're involuntary.

Jack smiles into Ianto's stomach then, before lifting his face to them both, grinning, knowing. Of course, Ianto can tell, of course Jack has done this before. 'There's a word, _omakase_ …know it?'

Ianto and Lisa laugh, because the last time they'd heard that word in London, they'd done it, had placed themselves at the mercy of the sushi chef. Jack's fingers trail over to Lisa, his eyes alight. His hand meets Ianto's over her breasts, and he pulls the bra from his fingers, dragging it across Ianto's chest before tossing it to the side with a snort.

'Shift up then,' Jack says, rising on his hands and knees. The muscles in his arms bunch and he passes a long brush of his face down Ianto's belly and cock as he does it; he feels like a taste of things to come. Lisa moves back to rest against the piles of pillows at the head of the bed and Ianto settles there with her, leaning back onto her chest, in between her legs. They don't shift, but he grabs them behind the knees and tugs them closer, almost as if she can wrap them around him. Lisa sighs, and he can feel the fall of her ribs under his head.

Jack sits back on his heels, arranging himself between Ianto's legs as well, a compact line of bodies. His eyes move along the contours of their bodies, looking, examining, searching for something before falling on Ianto's cock again. One comma of hair paints his brow. His breathing is steady, almost meditative, and Ianto spares a thought that he is about to have sex with his boss. It's only a second. Jack is of course, a force of nature first, and a boss second.

That force of nature smirks, then bends down and licks the line of Ianto's cock before taking it into his mouth so quickly that there's no time to go back to the previous train of thought. There's no time to think about consequences or Torchwood, or Lisa's even breathing behind him. Lisa's hands come around to turn him minutely. When Ianto rolls his head back and Lisa's mouth finds his, it's sweet, almost too sweet, to kiss her whilst Jack sucks him; he's never kissed her and been blown before, because her mouth could never be in two places at once, and they've never done this before, not with anyone else. It flits across Ianto's mind that he is breaking a marriage vow, for one brief flash he thinks of that, but she is right there, she wants this from him, so he sighs into her neck and stables that errant horse in his head.

The heat on his cock is almost unbearable, and it's not the heat, he knows, but the way that Jack's tongue works on the underside of his cock, the way his hands touch his balls, the way he's fingering Ianto's arse, his eyes rolled up to watch them. When he slides his mouth off, just for a few seconds so that he can lick and nuzzle, Ianto can hear himself cursing.

'A precursor,' Jack says, 'A fifty-pence word.' Then he returns his attentions elsewhere. Jack hums and touches, his fingertips alighting on the base of Ianto's cock and squeezing, or leaving altogether to make their way up to his chest. Lisa snakes a hand down and takes one of Jack's in hers. The effect is visually arresting, that they are curled about him, Lisa with her perfect nails and Jack's callused hand knitting together over him, almost feeling for his heartbeat.

One last comment from Jack, though, 'Don't be so smug, princess. You're next.'

Lisa laughs in Ianto's ear, her mouth travelling down his neck, and he grips her knees, wonders if he's crushing her. He can't wonder much else then, because Jack's mouth takes his cock again, and in seconds he's coming, thrusting off the bed, possibly whimpering, possibly reaching back behind him for Lisa, or for Jack's head, or just for the sheets bunched about them. Jack holds him in his mouth, licking and swallowing and in general mouthing him until he softens a bit, and then lets go reluctantly. Lisa releases Jack's hand, and Ianto slides off her to take some of the weight off, facing her but breathing at the ceiling, which allows him to notice for the first time that it has faint glow-in-the-dark stickers on it. They are shaped like stars.

Jack cracks his jaw a little bit, which Ianto takes as a compliment and then falls forward, behind Ianto, one arm draped over his waist, the other propping him up. He grins that sheepish grin that he saves for Suzie when he has blown up something vital that she has been working on.

'You two, are gorgeous,' he says with a great big pause in the middle. His fingers walk up Ianto's arm and find his ear. Tugging at the lobe. 'Heartbreakingly gorgeous.'

Ianto doesn't know what to say to that, because he is still trying to wrap his brain around the fact that the body behind him belongs to Jack Harkness, the Monster of Torchwood Three, his boss, the man who until recently used to deliberately misfile things in the Archives just to irritate him. This Jack, the man in bed, isn't someone that he knows at all; Ianto wonders if Jack feels that same way about him, if in his head he is reeling because he's just blown a subordinate. Somehow, it doesn't seem the same.

Even more impactual is Lisa, lying in front of him, her back against the pillows, her eyes hooded and content, as if she has come too, even though that cannot be true, really. Ianto glances at her nest of pubic hair, dark and tight, and he reaches for it with one hand before he remembers that she cannot feel it, and stops himself.

Jack's hand goes where Ianto's doesn't. 'I wasn't joking. That was just round one,' Jack says lightly. His hand moves at her crotch. 'You're wet, you know that, right?'

Ianto wants to reach up and bury his fingers in her, just to feel it, but he makes a fist instead, shoving it into the covers bunched in front of his chest.

Lisa waves him off. 'No no,' she says, her face slightly panicked. 'No I'm fine. You don't have to.' She lifts Jack's hand from her lap, and Jack runs them across his own lips before reaching forward and circling Ianto's. He can smell Lisa on the fingers, and his heart quickens a little.

Jack sighs. 'All right then, but if you change your mind.' He tilts his head; Ianto can see it as he looks backwards. 'Can I change your mind?'

Lisa rolls towards the nightstand and opens the drawer, pulls out a handful of something, and flips back to them, Ianto on his side, Jack behind him but sitting up. The condom packets smack Ianto in the face and Jack catches the bottle of lubricant. 'I want to watch,' she says. Her eyes are catlike almost, in the light, and Ianto has to close his.

It's odd that she would ask this. That she would want him to want this. Because the secret is that he wants this badly. What he _really_ wants, actually, truly, passionately, is for Lisa to scream for him, but she cannot do that. And he can't ask her to fake it. It's not the same. But if he cannot have that, he wants this—Jack Harkness, who has ogled and petted him for months, pleasuring his wife by pleasuring him. It's tricky. Ianto has imagined it multiple times, sometimes dreamt it, but those things are always passing fancy, not real. He's comfortable with them because they aren't supposed to _be_ real. And he certainly hasn't told them to Lisa, who smiles at him now, Cheshire, as if she knows every thing scribbled in his brain.

Not for the first time, he wonders if he talks in his sleep.

Jack runs his lips up and down his tricep. Ianto isn't looking at him, but he imagines that this moment is something charged. He imagines it in some jostled camera angle from an indie film. 'You're sure?' Jack whispers, and it is unclear to whom he speaking. He could be talking to himself, really.

Ianto turns one last time, lying flat on his back and reaching for Jack, hands searching for his cock and finding it hard, warm as the rest of him, pulse almost detectable when he squeezes.

'We're sure,' Lisa sings, and Ianto can hear the smile in her voice. 'Now don't keep me waiting, gentlemen.' And even as she says it, Jack's mouth connects with Ianto's and for a split second everything whites out Ianto's mind.

The rest of the evening feels strangely dreamlike. Ianto fugues in and out of it like a drunkard or someone half-asleep. Lisa is at his side, whispering into his ear, running her fingers on his cock, or on his balls. Jack's hands and mouth traverse his arms, his chest, his arse. He tries to reciprocate, he wants to touch Jack, touch Lisa, but his hands shake, at times he isn't sure if he's touching skin or hair or the sheets. At one point he realises that his hands are in Jack's, and Jack is manipulating them, all four of their hands moving on Ianto's cock. It feels distant and hollow, but it's one of the only things he can sense--Jack's fingers manipulating his against his foreskin, down to his balls, and finally, to touch his hole, both their hands working together, as if Jack is teaching him something. Jack seems to always be teaching him something these days.

Ianto can feel the lube on his fingers as he fucks himself, Jack's chest hovers in his vision, and when he ducks his head, that crooked cocky smile takes up airspace, becoming the sky of his vision. Jack finally takes Ianto's hands away, presses them back into the covers, turns Ianto over and kneels him up, his instructions a mixture of reassuring and seduction, compliments to Ianto's face, his voice, his smell, his arse, _Okay, now I'm going to do this,_ and, _It feels good, doesn't it?_ and finally, _Oh, you're ready, just open for me, gorgeous._ Ianto closes his eyes and falls backwards, letting himself be led, be fucked.

He comes to, as if he has lost time, his back pressed against Jack's chest, moving shamelessly on Jack's cock, or perhaps not moving at all, whilst Jack works inside him. Jack is still talking, and the things he says are less filthy than Ianto would have wagered; perhaps he is censoring himself on Lisa's account, though Ianto doubts it. Jack likes to guide the rhythm, his cock pushing into Ianto, solid and patient, one hand on Ianto's hip, the other curved around his chest to help him stay upright.

'You taste like coffee and brandy,' he whispers into Ianto's ear. 'I could tell from the moment I saw you, smelled you, Ianto. And this one,' he says, hand shifting from Ianto's hip to clasp Lisa's, and she rolls over so that she can put her hand there instead, fingers cool against Ianto's skin. 'I could smell you on her as soon as we walked in the door.'

Ianto rolls his head back to rest on Jack's shoulder, and it bows his spine. Lisa's hand reaches for Ianto's cock, and Jack pumps a few more times before laughing. 'I think we might have broken him,' he says as Lisa works him from the front, and Jack from the back. Ianto flails his arms a little, because he doesn't know what to do with them.

'Twice in one night,' Lisa says with amusement. Ianto opens his eyes and watches her pump his cock in her hand, matching the rhythm of Jack's thrusts. They're more organised than he gave them credit for, and when he comes all over Lisa's hand, and Jack fucks him just a little bit longer before following suit himself. He presses his whole torso against Ianto's so tightly that when he is done, gently pulling out and letting go with a bit of exhaustion, Ianto falls forward onto the bed, not caring that he's wet in front from where Lisa has smeared his come on his thighs.

'Oh fuck,' Ianto says into the pillow.

Jack laughs, and he topples a little, hands and knees, over Ianto like a coffee table on a rug, or the beginning of naked Twister. 'Yeah, totally.'

He averts the disaster of falling on Ianto by tipping to the side and collapsing onto his back on the other side, one leg assuredly hanging off the side of the bed. Ianto turns his head to look at him, his face sweaty, hair a bit plastered to his forehead, eyes half-lidded in pleasure until he turns and they are almost nose to nose. Jack flips up one hand and presses on Ianto's nose with his finger. 'Beep.'

Ianto shakes his head and blinks.

Jack squints at the ceiling and raises his head. 'Are those glow-in-the-dark stars?'

Lisa looks up. 'Yeah. I think this used to be the kid's room.'

Jack rolls to his feet and pads in to the en suite, shaking his head. 'Kid's room,' he mutters.

When he returns, he sits on the bed between them, kneeling on his heels. Ianto can feel the dip in the mattress. He is a little sore and very tired, and Lisa is petting his hair and he knows that he will drift off, and that is bothersome, because Jack is still there. How does this end? Does Jack just go home now? Does he stay for the night? Do they all get up in the morning for laverbread and cockles? Do they even have any breakfast food? Cereals? Toast, surely. And jam. Should it be nicer than a haphazard breakfast, or casual, like this isn't a big deal? Have they any good coffee left? Jack likes the good coffee.

He is distracted when Jack parts his legs a little and runs what feels like a warm wet flannel across his arse, then folds it in half and cleans the small of his back, his thighs. His eyes are having difficulty staying open, but he watches Lisa shove over a bit so that Jack, after tossing the rag off into the distance towards the loo (it lands with a splat on the lino floor), can sit between them, his hands still moving along their bodies with curiosity.

'Where…?' he starts, his hand running down the line of Lisa's back. Ianto watches him lick up Lisa's spine, starting at the tail. Somewhere in the small of her back, her expression changes when she can suddenly feel it, and she gasps.

'There,' she says, 'Thoracic nine.' Ianto knows it intimately. It and the scars that pattern her back, from the metal itself that twisted her, and from the surgeries desperate to repair it. He can find it in the dark by feel.

Jack stops and makes his way back to the place Ianto points to with his finger. He swirls his tongue around the area and then takes Ianto's finger in his mouth, sucking briefly, his eyes dark and, if Ianto has to pick a word for it, merciful.

'So many vertebrae in the spine,' Jack says casually as he crawls onto Ianto's back. One hand pushes Ianto down onto his chest on the bed, and the other presses on the base of Lisa's skull, working downwards. 'C one, C two.'

Jack traces the line of her spine as she rests on her elbows, his thumb resting in the divots of her vertebra. 'C three,' he says softly. 'C four. C five.' Here he places a kiss. Lisa looks over at Ianto, and he pillows his head on his arms. Jack's weight is welcome on his back, and he can feel the soft flesh of his balls when they brush his arse as he leans down again to kiss Ianto's spine as well, his other thumb kneading the knobs of bone under his skin and muscle.

Lisa sighs and shoves her head into the pillow whilst Jack's hand massages her, her ribs, and back up to where his inventory had stopped. Ianto lets the pads of Jack's fingers lull him onto sleep, his eyes mirroring Lisa's sleepy window shutter lids, as they listen together to Jack's downward recitation: 'C six, C seven, C eight.' Pause and kiss. 'T one, T two, T three…'

*~*~*~*~*~*

 

JACK

Jack finds that he is intrigued with the challenge that Lisa presents, on so many levels.

Unlike Ianto, who he sees at work, where they dance about each other in a strange 'I've seen you naked but we shouldn't say anything about that' two-step (four-step? six feet, two wheels?), Lisa is something for his off-hours only. To her, he is just Jack, just Jack, or rather, "my boy", and that is in itself freeing. He comes to them as much as he can—Torchwood isn't forgiving of absence—and it had been she who suggested that he deposit things in their spare room so that he can stay as long as he wants or as little as he likes without much thought.

Her exact words had been, 'Don't bring any busy-work; I have plans for you.' She'd thrown his clothes in with the wash the last time, and when he had pulled them from the drawers and held them, he could smell the jasmine and honey of her fabric softener.

It's all impossibly domestic. Mind-numbingly domestic. He's riveted to the dining room chair watching them clear plates, or fastened to the edge of the bed watching Ianto hang up his suit trousers, or paralysed in the doorway of Lisa's office, watching her shut down her computers as she bitches to Ianto about the crap wiring in the flat. Ianto usually gives him a look, one that says, "Here we go," and Jack usually raises his eyebrows as if to say, "Hey, innocent bystander."

He would never tell them that he finds the mundanity of it fascinating, because it's not all charming, not Ianto's bizarre sock rolling thing, or Lisa's penchant for singing bad show tunes in a terrible falsetto to irritate them both, or even his own increasing self-consciousness when he sets dirty dishes in the sink, because Lisa won't let him wash them (The glasses, at least, since he had broken two of them pushing his hand inside to wipe with the dishrag.). But all in all, boring and thrilling and _not_ chasing weevils around Bute Park, or sleeping in a cave under his office.

Like right now, they're watching but not quite watching some shite film about a killer robot from the future that comes back in time, and Lisa has long lost interest, possibly for the most obvious of reasons. Ianto is resolutely staring at the screen, and so when Jack shifts in his chair across the room and yawns, he is surprised to feel the grape expertly land in his mouth. It's so shocking that he almost chokes for a minute, and when he opens his eyes, Lisa grins at him from her end of the sofa and raises her eyebrows.

 _Oh. Really,_ he makes his face say as he chews.

She waves the grape in her hand back and forth. _Yes. Really._

Jack looks at Ianto, frowning at the screen, his fingers digging into the arm of the sofa, and Jack realises that he's not enjoying the film. Ianto had picked it out specifically because he would _not enjoy_ it. And now he's going to ignore them and make himself watch the robot from the future shoot out an entire police station, because he couldn't manage to--

Well, that's not on. Jack opens his hands and nods to Lisa, and she throws a cluster of grapes at him. He catches them and then opens his mouth so she can fire another one, but it bounces off his nose and pings off the wall. He doesn't even bother to see where it went.

He head-jerks at Lisa and gestures with one hand. _Shift over._ When she complies, he takes aim and throws the grape. It lands squarely in the mug of tea that Ianto is clutching in the hand that is not fastened to the sofa arm like a vice grip.

'You two,' Ianto says, eyes not leaving the screen, 'are prats.'

Lisa fishes the grape from his mug and pops it in her mouth. 'We two, are bored.'

'Then go have sex,' Ianto says, in the manner of a person telling their bored children to go outside and play. Jack snorts and Lisa pauses for a few seconds before looking over at Jack.

Then she thrusts the bag of grapes at Ianto and pushes herself up off the sofa and into her chair with practised ease. 'Okay,' she says brightly, and then she's off, the whining of her hydraulics a little chipper song to follow her back into the bedroom.

Ianto hadn't been listening, but his brain catches up handsomely, and he looks at the bag of grapes and the mug of tea and the empty space on the sofa and then up at Jack, his eyes narrowed as if to say, 'What did you just do?'

Jack grins. 'I think your wife wants you to bang her,' he tells Ianto, stretching out in his chair and cracking his neck. 'I'd hop to, if I were you.'

Lisa wheels backwards into the room so that she can see them both. 'You two are impossible. It's _The Terminator_ , Ianto; you've seen it before. And you—' she points at Jack '—are too smug for your own good. Stop dithering about with the "wife" comments and hop to yourself.'

And then she's gone.

Ianto stares at the screen, as if he is unsure where to go from there, but after a few seconds of fumbling with the remotes to turn off the telly and the speakers, all the accoutrements of a shiny entertainment system of the twenty-first century, he blinks in the dim light. The only illumination is the table lamp on Lisa's side of the sofa.

Jack stands, but he doesn't want to make a big production number out of it, because something is in the air tonight, and it isn't fairy dust or alien pollen. He can see it in Ianto's eyes when he gives Jack the once over, covering his glance by tidying the magazines and picking up the dirty dishes. The walls knock a little with the hot water running into the loo, where Lisa has started her prep. She'll be at least ten minutes.

Jack has never had sex with Lisa. Not actual, full blown sex. Lisa likes to watch him and Ianto, and Jack's watched Ianto and Lisa move together in a slow rhythm, but that last step, the one that would seal some sort of circle that they are all trying to close, that hasn't happened. Jack is unsure why. This is so far from the first threesome that he's been in that it reminds him of trying to do upper multiplication tables in his head: three times fifty-four is one sixty-two, three times one hundred twenty is three sixty, and so on.

Instead, he shoves his hands in his pockets and shrugs at Ianto, who walks stiffly to the kitchen and puts away the grapes. 'You go ahead,' Ianto says, his eyes flashing with something that Jack is unsure of. 'I'll be along in a minute or two.'

These are the moments in which Jack wishes he had more sensitivity. No matter how good this thing is that they have here in this flat, it comes with all sorts of things that started outside the flat: Ianto and Lisa themselves, Canary Wharf, their marriage before that, and since then, hell, Jack has enough baggage to fill several luxury staterooms on the Titanic. Jack wants to touch Ianto, really, to pull him in and wrap his arms under his, feel the subtle movement of his breathing. Sometimes he does, and sometimes he can only smile and nod and do as he's told.

He winks to cover all manner of sins and insecurities, and about-faces, stopping at the foyer to toe off his shoes. Behind him there is the gentle clanking of dishes in the sink, Ianto's evening nocturn to order.

He unrolls his cuffs as he makes his way down the hall, eyes flitting to the pictures that line it: an older couple that must be Lisa's parents. A woman that he knows is Ianto's sister with her family, working class husband and two chubby-faced children. Another picture, a wedding, Lisa standing in white, radiant, smashing cake into Ianto's face. Jack likes the picture. It reminds him of that bittersweet happiness that comes with looking at smiling faces in the past and saying, 'This is what it was like before everything went to shit and we didn't know that it was coming.'

Jack keeps his own box of those pictures, but he has nowhere to hang them, even if he wanted to look at them every day.

He has unbuttoned his shirt but not removed it, and for once he is glad that he isn't wearing a vest. Lisa keeps the house warm--her vasomotor system is obviously a little out of whack—and so he hasn't worn anything under his shirts here in a while. He undoes his belt but doesn't pull it out of the loops, just lets it hang there, creating a tangle of braces and belt that make him wonder why he has to have so many straps across his body.

The bathroom door is open slightly, and he can see Lisa through it, so he stops to watch her, because she is gorgeous and flawed and a woman he has an increasingly vested interest in keeping happy, much to his occasional chagrin.

Lisa sits in her chair by the edge of the bathtub, her feet propped up, knees raised, so that she can spread her now naked legs. The catheter is in her hand, and she's applying lube to one end of it before she just stares at it and the plastic 1.5 litre bottle on the floor. The sink is within reach, and it is filled with what looks to be soapy water, a flannel floating on the surface before it saturates and sinks down to the bottom of the porcelain basin. Her crotch is wet, probably from cleaning herself in preparation.

All that bravado is gone when she sits there in the loo, holding the catheter, her face set in the blank mask that Jack sees in her from time to time. Three minutes ago, she was a randy woman about to have a fabulous night with two men in her bed, and now here it is, a reminder that oh, that's not exactly true. Well, it's still true, it certainly will be if he has anything to say about it, but it's not so simple as skipping into the bedroom and rolling about on the sheets and humping like a National Geographic special.

There's prep work, now, and it's all an exercise in patience, isn't it? Who's patient when they want to get off? Jack knows that he usually isn't.

'Let me help with that,' he says then, opening the door wide so that she can look up and see him there, half dressed, waiting for her. He might have even posed a little; yeah, it's nice, he knows it, and he wants her to know it too.

Lisa sighs. 'No, it's fine. It's all just so, so _unromantic_ ,' she says, and by that she means _repulsive_.

He pulls his socks off and tosses them in the hamper in the corner of the bathroom. 'Then don't do it. Come with me right now.' He puts a nice lurid emphasis on the "come" part, just so she'll know that he's not in any way, shape or form giving her an order.

Lisa grimaces. 'I'm not to the point where I feel comfortable pissing on you mid coitus,' she says to him, and Jack has to kneel down and turn her chair, lowering her closer foot to the floor. The other one skids a bit on the tub edge, and he steadies it. He maneuvers himself between her legs and holds out his hand for the catheter.

She doesn't want to relinquish it, he can see, so he has to gentle it from her hand, and then he holds it up to her. 'Just rubber,' he says. 'Sexy. Rowr.'

He waggles his eyebrows and she laughs a little, but he can see that she is not convinced.

The thing is, Jack has had sex with unmoving creatures before, and also paralysed creatures, and even a human prostitute he'd met once in St. Louis, a pretty girl named Wanda, who'd peddled her wares from her wheelchair.

There is nothing horrible here, really, he tries to tell her with his eyes, because words don't mean anything right. It's all just different. Different eyes and different fingers. That's what all his stories mean, actually. Different skin or no skin, feathers, scales, incandescent slime. Fifteen limbs, no tongues, a tail or three, wings and horns and yeah, tentacles.

There's hand-to-hand, and fingers and appendages and phalli in holes, and licking and touching. There's eye-to-eye and e-sex uploaded to central nervous systems from thousands of miles away. There's come and sweat, and spit, so much spit, and in all of this that a body can do, there are other functions—piss and shit and mucus and farts and snot. Tears, most assuredly, blood, and her lubricant on his fingers when he feels her cunt, her clit. The list will run out, but the sentiment continues beyond into noises and textures, into smells, breaths, the gentle rocking of a fuck in the afternoon sun, or a thrashing beating that might be true love sex in the back of an alley.

And this? This contraption that facilitates one of the many workings of the human machine? _Oh Lisa,_ he wants to say, _oh honey, this is_ nothing.

He wants to tie the catheter in a bow and gift it to her.

Lisa's other foot falls from the edge of the bathtub, and he catches it before it can thunk to the floor and her knee bruises on impact with the porcelain edge. His eyes divert from hers while he looks down at her, fingers searching for the opening to the urethra, and when he finds it, he lowers the red tubing and eases it in, this red tubing that says to him that she could have had any colour in the world, but she chose this one.

She lets him insert it about two inches, never asks him if he knows how to do it, which of course he does. How he knows is private, and he might tell her some day, but for now, he pushes gently, looking for resistance and finding none, and before he goes the last bit he takes the other end of the tube and deposits it in the plastic bottle that she uses because it must be easier than the toilet bowl or a hat. He wonders if she does it in the shower in the morning, when he and Ianto have left, and the thought of her, fragile and precarious and touching herself, fingers roaming her crotch, makes him a little more than half-hard.

Lisa's face turns away when the flow starts, and he cranes his head so that she can see it in her peripheral. 'Hey,' he says, 'hey gorgeous, when we're done here, I'm going to ram you into the mattress.'

Lisa's head turns back to him, but her eyes are looking at the flowers on the wallpaper, as if they are distracting. 'Oh _are_ you?'

The hand holding the catheter in place shifts so that he can slide two fingers inside her, his gesture deliberate so that she can _see_ that he has done it. 'Oh yeah,' he says, voice as casual as he can make it while he eyes the bottle to make sure the flow is still moving. Lisa's urine is pale yellow, not alarming. He knows that she'll be interested in the colour, so he uses his free hand to lift it up, so that she can see it, and she blushes a bit. He smiles and rubs the bottle against his cheek. It's warm.

She smiles and is about to say something when there is a small knock on the doorjamb. The tinkle of glasses; Ianto has broken out the scotch.

'Ah, we've started early,' he says mildly, as if they'd broken into the crudités while he'd been in the kitchen, or perhaps a little kissing and fumbling while he undresses at the foot of the bed. It's okay. Jack likes vegetables, and he'll never turn down fumbly kisses, because awkwardness is where some of the best things are discovered.

Lisa shakes her head and Jack lowers the bottle to the floor. The flow is slowing and after a few seconds it is done, and he finds her clit and rubs as he pulls the tubing out slowly. He extracts the tube from the bottle and tosses it gently in the sink full of soapy water.

Jack can hear the rustle of Ianto's dress shirt when he reaches over his shoulder to hand Lisa the glass of scotch, long fingers pornographic to Jack in his state. He wants a drink too, god does he want one, just one, but one will lead to another and another, and this is his night off, so very rare, and he wants to be sober for it. Jack has found that he always wants to be sober these days, because years of drunkenness had taught him that he _misses_ things. There are urgent things that he should not miss.

Lisa belts her drink and watches him amusedly as he cleans her front to back with the warm wet flannel, and he can see Ianto leaning against the edge of the sink, glass up to his lips. His mouth is set in a line that might be a smile, or studious curiosity.

Jack starts to give Ianto the bottle so that he can empty it into the loo, but impulse makes him catch Lisa's hand and he takes the empty glass from her, and with her fingers still loosely gripping the glass, he pours a finger-length of her urine into it. Lisa tries to wrench her hand away, but his are so much larger, and he lifts the glass to his lips and sips it, knowing that it is not a bad taste, just what it is.

She makes a noise in the back of her throat; he is quite sure that this has rather been too much, and this is the tipping point, and so he is genuinely surprised when she doesn't take the glass from him and throw it. Instead, she holds it back up to his lips when it falls away, and he hands Ianto the bottle so that he can wrap his other hand around hers and drink.

There is a clink of plastic on glass, and Jack watches Ianto swallow the rest of his scotch before mirroring Jack's action. Jack wants to tell him that he doesn't have to do it, that this isn't a contest, but Ianto's eyes never leave Lisa's when he pours the rest of the urine in the toilet and sets the bottle on the counter before drinking from his glass, because Ianto always takes care of business before pleasure, and that isn't lost on either of them.

Jack hands Ianto the glass when they are done, and he stands, holding his hand out to Lisa as if she can just get up and follow him out onto a dance floor. He loves when she blushes, and her white-white teeth glint just for him. 'Yeah?'

Jack carries Lisa to the bed, and Ianto follows with the chair; her arms are hot around his neck, and while he walks the short distance she licks a trail to his ear, and he cannot wait to put her down. His hands are too busy.

He sets her on the edge of the bed and she balances, pulling off her top and unhooking her bra in that mysterious one-handed technique that it feels like all women are born knowing how to do, along with that towel knot thing for their hair.

In the background he can hear Ianto running the sink, draining the water, probably hanging Lisa's catheter on the little plastic sticky hook tacked to the wall by the toothbrushes, where it can dry out. There is a clink of glass and he knows that the glasses are clean and drying on the towel rack, probably. Ianto is thorough and deliberate, more deliberate when he is trying to be a serious grown up.

Jack wants to watch him come undone, and he figures that tonight, which started with a fantastic plate of spag bol, killer robots and grapes and an unexpected chaser, this night might be a good night for it.

For a split second, he wants to fuck Lisa with his clothes on, some material barrier between them, something to hold him back. Instead, he watches her scoot back onto the bed, her eyes riveted to Ianto's over his shoulder. And Ianto's hands take his shirt from his shoulders like he takes his coat when he comes into the Hub. Well, except for that kiss at the nape of his neck.

He undoes his own flies and steps out of his trousers, and Lisa watches them sail across the room to the stuffed chair that has become the place where he sits sometimes in the night, while they sleep, reading by moonlight or just dozing half-in, half-out, when he doesn't want to lie down but he doesn't want to leave. Behind him he can hear the rustle of Ianto's clothes sliding off, and he's a little disappointed that he missed it. In the dim light of the nightstand lamp Ianto is pale, the hair on his body making shadows on his skin, and Jack wants to run his fingers through it, foreign chest hair, lick his way down the furred thighs and calves. He runs a hand across his own chest, trying to imagine what it must feel like.

Lisa yawns loudly and his attention is drawn back to her. He abandons thoughts of Ianto for her, crawling across the bed to settle on her far side and reach up with one hand and rub her scalp. She turns into his touch, and he slides just the tips down the side of her face, following the line of her cheek and jaw until he stops sharply in the middle of her chin. She doesn't even open her eyes, just waits until he draws a line right down the center of her throat to the hollow, where he swirls, drawing a few circles before branching out to her clavicles and finally bending to kiss her there.

Lisa's skin is on fire. Jack understands that sometimes she can't control how she reacts to cold and heat, and he wonders if this is one of those times, or if she just always runs hot. Jack shifts lower so that he can look down at her chest, at the faint scars licking the sides from the back, her beautiful back with its striped scars, crisscrossing like straps or bandoleers of pain, marks of honour that she wears forever, painted there by trauma and grief.

He wonders sometimes if Ianto knows how close she came to death, if she knows how close she came to death, not just from the explosion and the collapse of the equipment on her fragile body, but from Ianto himself, when he had pulled her from the wreckage. Jack had found and burned all the files, deleted them from UNIT's system, so that they would never know. No one needs to know that. But Jack knows, and that's enough, enough to want to make him Retcon them both into forever and never look back.

He can't help but notice that he hasn't done anything of the sort.

Ianto comes to them then, patient, silent, small smile. Jack likes Ianto riled up, quiet, angry; he likes him sad, smug and satisfied. All ways, actually. Lisa had told him that once that Ianto is a different man now, and that she worries about what he might do at any given stressor. Jack likes the challenge of taking him apart and piecing him together, like when he used to get new recruits at the Academy and he had to make soldiers out of them.

He brings Ianto's head in for an eager kiss, over Lisa's body, and her hands find theirs, find their faces, their chests, moving enough to make up for the parts that can't. Jack catches one of those manicured hands in his and presses it to his mouth.

He's hard, has been for a while, and it beats at the back of his consciousness, a steady pulse that wants him to fuck and fuck and fuck. He likes the feeling, actually, not unlike the anticipation of waiting the night before a big day or receiving a gift and deliberately refraining from opening it until the right moment. Jack has learnt to like the flutter it gives his heart.

Ianto stretches out on Lisa's other side and buries his face in her neck. Jack can hear the heavy inhalation he makes though his nose. Jack decides that he has been remiss in his attentions to Lisa and resumes an oral cataloguing of her finer points from the waist up, starting with her flat belly, smooth and dark, tiny navel perfect for his tongue.

Ianto watches him run his tongue up her sternum with interest, as if Jack can teach him things to please her, and of course he can, and of course he's more than happy to. He wishes that he had glasses to push up on his nose as he looks over at the younger man. Lisa moans in contentment, her hands on Jack's thigh, on Ianto's neck.

'Observe, if you will, the sensitive area on the underside of the breasts,' he says in a stern and playful voice before lowering his head to take her breast in his mouth, suckling and then releasing it to nuzzle under the flesh, to the curve of skin normally under the breast itself. The  
skin there is soft and dewy and smells like Lisa's own scent and the body wash that she uses. He feels Ianto's hand close on his over her other breast, and then his face is there too, circling the nipple with the tip of his tongue. 'Go to the head of the class,' Jack whispers hoarsely, because he knows the tip of that tongue well, and what it can do elsewhere.

Ianto suckles her breast for a second before he takes as much of it in his mouth as he can, and Jack returns to Lisa's neck, sliding up and pinning her arm down at the wrist.

'Jack, Jack, Jack,' she whispers, but she doesn't add anything. She doesn't pull on her arm, like he had thought she might, so he kisses the underside of it, the underarm, the upper rise of her ribcage. Ianto does the same, possibly because he wants to try all Lisa's secret open places, possibly because he understands the power of mirror actions. They are not disappointed when she groans and shifts her shoulders, saying something under her breath that could be a curse, could be a protest.

'Now, I don't care what you say, Darling, but not going down on you is a spectacularly inhuman crime,' Jack murmurs, trying to make it so outrageous that she can't refuse as he leaves her upper half in Ianto's capable hands and slides further down on the bed so that he can crawl in between her legs and cradle them. One of Ianto's hands reaches out to crook the knee that is closest to him, and Jack props up the other one. Lisa's hands slap the bedding ineffectually, and he reaches out with his free hand to touch her, warm, wet, ready for him, but that's later. For now, he licks a line from end to end, finding her clit with his tongue and teeth, smelling her (musk and body wash again, and just a tint of latex, oh yeah.).

He doesn't mind that she doesn't writhe. Ianto's ministrations to her skin and breasts and neck, to the crooks of her elbows (now that he's on the case, he can find all her best zones), the webbing in between her fingers, that makes her moan enough to stir his cock even more. It feels heavy, too large (Is there such a thing? He wonders.).

Sometime while he is busy, because Lisa is a mystery worth exploring, Ianto moves behind him, and he hears the clicking of the lube cap snapping shut. He lifts himself enough to look over his shoulder. Ianto raises his hand, fingers shiny with lube and waggles them, raising his eyebrows. Lisa giggles and Jack sighs with relief.

'I think I was promised a proverbial nailing,' Lisa reminds him, and something hard runs down his forearm before she flicks it on, and the vibrator is live. Jack watches it dance along his skin, long handled, industrial, and red red red. Lovely.

'Oh _yeah_ ,' he says, because being in the middle is too fun. He wishes he had another way to describe it aside from some sandwich jokes and the word "fingercuff" or whatever funny ass words this century has for it.

Jack shifts so that he's up on his knees in between Lisa's, and one last time, leans back to kiss Ianto, Lisa all over his face and mouth and when he tastes her on Jack's tongue, on his lips and chin, Ianto grips his jaw in one lube-free hand and licks him roughly. Jack wonders if he has tasted her since the accident, or if he had thought that would be too personal, too painful. Jack is a firm believer in not just getting back on the horse, but taking it for a run, then jumping a few logs and doing some mild dressage.

He is already making lists for next time, next time.

It's easy to sit Lisa up a bit so that he doesn't have to hover over her impossibly or yank her cunt into his lap like an upside-down doll, neither of which seem particularly satisfying for a scenario that is about more than fucking. It's even easier still to kiss her mouth, bite her lips, while Ianto busies himself, coating his cock with lube, wiping the slick fingers of his left hand on the crack of Jack's arse.

'A precursor,' Ianto whispers mockingly. 'A seventy quid word.'

Lisa giggles.

Jack will never live that down, ever.

'Okay,' he says to Ianto when he's in place, 'you know what to do just—ah.' Ianto's fingers slide in and he relaxes around them, thinking about when they curl about an old fashioned glass or clutch a pen, or, well, pretty much anything really. On Ianto's second day Jack had watched him suck a papercut on that long index finger and he had known then that Ianto Jones was going to be a bad bad thing for him. Those fingers probing his arse right now have just proven him correct.

Lisa turns on the vibrator again, and the humming is loud, almost like a generator. Jack has to repress a laugh—vibrators almost always make him chuckle. At least this one doesn't have a rabbit or a dolphin on it. It is a sturdy thing, made for people in her condition, stronger, harder. Jack has been dying to use it. He sighs when her hand wraps around his cock and guides him, not because they are in the dark, but because his eyes are closed. She can only take him so far, though, she can't guide him by feel, so he has to look at her again, her eyes first, sparking almost, and those lips, bruised from kissing and wet from licking. She smiles and then he runs one finger down her breasts, damp with sweat, areolas large and dark. He almost wishes that she were breastfeeding, because they would be huge, swelled, dripping with milk, and that is always lovely.

He twists his fingers in her pubic hair, because he can't not. Ianto manipulates a third finger in his arse and Jack groans. He's often wondered what it would feel like to have a cunt so that he could be filled from both sides, but this will have to do, he thinks in passing. Maybe someday. He supposes he has lots of somedays to think about.

Ianto pulls out his fingers slowly. 'Shall we do this in unison?' he asks over Jack's ear, droll, dryly, as if this is just some little lark they do all the time and his suggestion is something, anything to cut the _boredom_. It's the only way he knows that Ianto's worried about what's about to happen. Jack reaches behind him to grasp Ianto's neck; if he could put blinkers on him sometimes he totally would. Ianto's eyes widen, sometimes, like a horse in a fire, and Jack wonders when he acquired that trait.

'You first,' he chokes out, and it's hard, because Lisa has slid the vibrator inside her, and is moving it; every now and again it bumps his cock at the opening and he gets a jolt of the vibration. He smacks her hand. 'You wait for us.'

Lisa smacks his cock and he almost yelps. 'Hurry up then.'

Ianto chuckles over Jack's shoulder, and it is conspiratorial. It takes Jack a second to realise that he is the outsider here, the one not in on the joke. It feels off balance, as if he should be in on it, because he's in the center, right? But that doesn't mean anything, not really, Lucky Pierre, ha ha and all that. Jack feels strangely empty without Ianto's fingers, and he freezes when Ianto presses the tip of his cock against his hole.

'Before you say anything, Jack,' Ianto begins, and when Jack is waiting for the independent clause, Ianto thrusts into him without any further preamble, and wow, is that a complete sentence or what? Jack is so stunned and merrily surprised that he barely manages to slip inside of Lisa, with the vibrator working overtime, and when his cock hits home and everything is shaking, Jack knows that the noise he makes is something raw and scratchy like steel wool and those are the best kinds of noises really.

Ianto places a hand on Jack's hip, another on his shoulder, and presses his forehead into Jack on the other side. 'Oh, Lis,' he says softly, 'it's moving _through_ him.'

Jack regains the ability to speak when he can pull out of Lisa a little. 'Now let me just find the, the—' He has to reach back to hold one of Ianto's hips, so that it doesn't move out of turn. Ianto smiles into his skin, rubbing his stubbled chin on his shoulder.

He forgot how tight women can be sometimes, it's easy to forget when you think about the asshole and the muscle there. But the cunt is something different, really, not as tight, just as warm, almost just as enveloping, but it feels different. Jack knows he's had this conversation in his head several times before, but the middle of a fantastic fuck is not where he is known to do his best thinking, even with his John Thomas, and now is no different. He thrusts back into Lisa, against the vibrator, reaching with his one free hand to play with it, palm over hers. His other hand pulls Ianto's hips so that they move in a cascading rhythm, dominoes, one of those clacking ball displays made for an office desk.

Oh, _offices_. Jack has to pull on his balls a little, leaving the vibrator, because if he hadn't, he'd have just come, and that would have been embarrassing. Lisa is just getting started, and Ianto can slow and speed up at preternatural will.

The rhythm is flexible, like taffy. Jack finds that it is easy to drift in it, get lost in it, one hand on the vibrator, working his cock in with it (set to low! What the hell would it feel like at "Full Speed Ahead"?), and Ianto getting the residual sent through his arse right to him, some sort of Chinese whispers, Chinese vibrations, telephone game; Jack is the wire between the telegraph machines.

Lisa moves the vibrator with a sense of urgency that cuts through Jack's blurriness, through the grunting noises Ianto makes in his ear, through her little whimpers when she uses her free hand to caress her breasts. Her skin is so hot, molten, and the pads of his fingers skid across her like ice on a griddle. The vibrator is reaching into wherever it is that she is damaged, trying to reconnect for her, and it never will, but if he touches her, if his hand inflames her breasts, her ribs, the line of her waist, if he can show her that he loves her body with touch and noise and the rhythm of his pounding, of Ianto's pounding through him, then he can get her to come for him. He stretches a little to scratch her neck with his nails. Lisa cannot lean forward as much as she would like, but she does a good job with her free hand.

'Fuck me,' she whispers, and it's easy to just do it, speed up, try not to give in too quickly to the vibrator, which is merciless. Jack has a healthy amount of respect for the vibrator now, he realises as it slides along the top of his cock.

It almost isn't even important when he comes, when Ianto comes, because the rhythm is what is important, the movement, this thing that they try to stretch out. At one point, he falls forward a bit; it messes with the pattern, yeah, but he has to kiss her, has to have her mouth, and Ianto simply follows him down, one hand around his waist so that he won't put his weight on her, holding him up. Not letting go. And when Jack rights himself, a buoy impossible to keep underwater, Ianto lets go of him and reaches for Lisa's hand, and they twine their fingers over Jack's chest, the gold glint of their wedding rings stabbing him in the heart a little.

Afterwards, he and Lisa sprawl on the bed, when Ianto is fetching them all water. Jack waits for her to say something, anything, about this situation, this thing that has so very quickly become more complicated than Jack had intended, but something he cannot seem to shake.

'Ianto,' Lisa says, her voice low, her hand urgently squeezing his as she finds his eyes in the near darkness. 'You have to love him.' It's a command.

'That's a tall order,' he replies.

Her eyes are kind. 'Liar.'

*~*~*~*~*~*

 

IANTO

Operation Goldenrod is a rousing failure. The device has been contained finally, but the past three days have been a nightmare. Ianto had fallen onto the sofa at the Hub, trying to unsee the disfigured bodies, to unhear the screaming as he'd gone from body to body, trying to find a place to use the sedative gun on them.

Owen had been working around the clock, but body after body had kept dying. Jack, Owen's surgical assistant, had dashed about, handing over instrument after instrument, tossing piles of bloody rags and body parts into the biohazard bins for Ianto to cart off to the incinerator.

Suzie had taken Tosh home to sleep off her first-kill panic.

Ianto's clothing had been long past ruined—it's been incinerated along with dozens of bodies they couldn't save, people whose families will never know what actually happened to them. He usually tries to find a body to match and disfigure enough to make it resemble the person, so that the families will have something to claim, but this time, it is impossible. He would have to dig into the frozen Torchwood employees, but Jack has drawn the line, saying that people will just have to file missing persons and never know.

They all agree that it's almost better that way, anyway.

Jack is taking the escape of the machine from the Hub badly. Ianto knows that he himself is partly to blame, because he hadn't filed it properly, locked it down like he should have, when Tosh was done with it. Some part of him is insanely grateful that the machine hadn't actually started fusing bodies until after it left the Hub, because the thought of any of them on Owen's table, screaming and writhing with open skin and livers and yowling throats makes him queasier than the last bag of squelchy body parts he'd thrown into the incinerator right before he'd stripped off at the end of the day and burned his clothes.

Then he'd had a proper cry in the showers, where no one could hear him, because that is The Torchwood Way, and donned his spare clothes—a t-shirt and denims that he'd brought in to wear when mucking out the weevil cages.

Now that it is all over, Owen has lit out to crawl inside a bottle; Suzie had never returned from Tosh's, but she is never reliable in that way anyway; as soon as Suzie is free of the Hub sometimes, it is hard to make her return. Jack says that's how she works. Ianto doesn't quite care as long as she comes back eventually. It's not his place to judge.

That leaves the two of them. Ianto decides that he's going to autoclave every instrument in Owen's lab before he gets back, and he staunchly tells himself that hosing down the walls of the autopsy theatre and replacing all the equipment that's been ruined by slamming bodies and Owen's frustrated trashing of the place is his job, a gift to Owen, so that he can come back in whenever he sobers up and pretend that it never happened, that he hadn't been a failure.

Ianto would never say Owen is a failure anyway. The whole thing had been, as Lisa likes to call bad things, 'made of fail'. He runs the water and dumps tools into the basin as he finds them scattered everywhere: scalpel on the floor in the corner, forceps caught in the chain of the upper railing, and so on.

Jack emerges from his office, presumably at the sound. He stands at the upper railing and surveys the wreckage, probably seeing it in its entirety for the first time. 'Go home.'

Ianto glances up at him. 'No, I'll finish this,' he replies, circling about the room to find the last of the loose implements. When he is sure that he has collected them all, he dips his hands in the soapy water and swirls them around. He likes them to be relatively clean before they go into the autoclave, and he has already decided that he's going to run it at least three times, for symbolism.

'I called Lis, told her you'd be home soon,' Jack says, and it nags at Ianto because Jack isn't his keeper, and then he has to remind himself that in this place, Jack is his boss.

He looks at Jack again, hands gripping the chain, eyes not on him, but rather staring at the splashes of blood on the autopsy table, the floor, the morgue drawers, as if Owen had come in to work and said, "You know, I feel like the medical bay just isn't Basqiat enough," and then tossed every blood sample they'd had all over the place.

'I can't go home,' he says softly, 'because you drove me.' That is a lie. Not the driving part—Jack did give him a ride four days ago on their way to work before they had known that the next half-week would be a nightmare. It's a lie because he could take a cab. He could walk to the bus stop. Lisa could come get him if she were so inclined. Ever since she passed the specialised test, she likes to drive the car with its modified steering and pedals.

But it's the first thing he says, and maybe by saying it, he can communicate what he means, which is, 'No one should have to do this alone.'

Jack must agree with the unspoken statement, because he joins Ianto on the lower level and pulls on a pair of gloves. 'This could wait,' he says, but he drags a damp rag along the centrifuge cabinet. 'Go home. I'll take care of it.'

'Jesus, Jack, if you do my job any more than you're already doing, Owen will think I've crawled up your arse completely.' Ianto doesn't know where this is coming from, but he decides to roll with it, and if Jack doesn't like it, he can go back to his office and…clean his gun or call someone important. 'You're not alone in this, you know,' Ianto bites out. 'There's a reason you call us a team.'

It occurs to him that he doesn't know what he's talking about.

Jack stops with the rag in his hand and looks at Ianto, studying him, as if he has finally figured out that this is about more than post-mission-failure clean up. 'I don't do your job,' he says softly. And then, as if he is desperate to lighten things, he resumes scrubbing the walls. 'I just like helping. And my coffee is shit.'

Ianto shakes his head. Jack's coffee is like motor oil.

He grabs handfuls of instruments and throws them into the shelving of the autoclave, and it doesn't occur to him that he's sliced his hand open through the glove until he sees red on the outside of the unit and thinks to himself that he hadn't washed as thoroughly as he had supposed. Jack grabs his wrist and holds it up to their eye level.

'Take off the gloves, let me see.' But he doesn't bother waiting for Ianto, and instead he peels the glove off himself, tossing it aside on the table and examining Ianto's palm, which is now sporting an angry two centimeter gash that doesn't look very deep. Blood runs in rivulets down his outstretched fingers and drips onto the floor, mingling with the dirty water and coagulated blood that is there already. Ianto is vaguely surprised that his blood looks just like everyone else's. All the dead people he burnt up.

'Huh,' is all he says, because it hurts, but it feels far away. Pain through a tunnel.

Jack cleans the wound in the sink, then dries it and disinfects it. Ianto can't even sit down, there isn't a clean surface anywhere. They can't find the steri strips and Ianto isn't about to let Jack near him with a suture kit, so they slather it with antibacterial ointment and pack it with gauze. Ianto ignores Jack's suggestion of super glue and then they tape the whole thing together with medical strapping.

They re-glove and set about scrubbing the place rough and raw. Jack moves the furniture as Ianto uses the hose, scouring the walls with the pressure nozzle. Ianto squeegies the floor and Jack removes the last of the blood traces from the table and the sink. Then they move everything back. When they are done, Ianto thinks that he can only smell bleach. His head is a little woozy, and he isn't sure why.

When he de-gloves over the sink, his hand is painted red. Jack recleans and bandages the wound, tutting softly, and then he palms his keys, grabs their coats and leads Ianto from the Hub.

On the way home in the car, the radio station plays "Mack the Knife". Jack turns it off with a decided click.

Ianto smiles at him as they take the lift, and Jack's own smile is weak in return. Ianto isn't even sure why he does it. Just having Jack there is reassuring. He isn't sure what he would say to Lisa if he came home by himself.

Jack has been living with them for two months, coming and going and sharing their bed, setting up his own space in which he keeps books, ammo and clothing, the occasional DVD. Ianto calls the small bedroom that Jack uses "The Lair", because it just has a few shelves, a very small bed, and an overstuffed chair that he never uses for its intended purpose. Jack seems to like small spaces, from his office at the Hub to the hole underneath it, and occasionally Ianto catches him crunched up in the back of the SUV, reading a pulp novel. Those are the times he doesn't want anyone to find him. It's odd that a man who seems to take up so much space actually prefers the opposite, in some of his quieter moments.

They stumble in the door; Ianto falls face-first on the sofa again and closes his eyes. Lisa and Jack are in the kitchen, he can hear them, mumbling or just talking quietly. There's a long silence, and when Ianto raises his head to make sure they aren't on fire, dead or in bloody pieces, Jack is on his knees in front of her wheelchair, arms wrapped around her waist, head buried in her chest. Lisa rests her cheek on the top of his head and her arms over his, threading her fingers through the hair at his temples over and over again.

Ianto lowers his head back to the sofa and mashes his face into the cushions.

When he comes to, later, the house smells like toast. Jack and Lisa are sitting at the table and eating, talking softly. Ianto scrubs at his face with the sleeve of his flannel button down and joins them, blinking in the light. Jack watches him over his mug of tea. Lisa fixes Ianto a cup to his liking and sets it by his bandaged hand. They eat in silence, toast and preserves and cold summer sausage and small digestives and grapes. Ianto appreciates the segmented nature of it.

That night, Ianto crawls in between them and presses himself up against the curve of Lisa's hip, his top arm pulling Jack's over his shoulder like a blanket. Jack shudders into his back, just for a second, and Ianto wants to lick the tears from his face.

So he does.

Operation Goldenrod fades into memory. The team returns to normal. Tosh learns to speak again, Suzie is available to others, and Owen is sober on a more regular basis. Jack pushes the whole thing into a box in his mind, he tells Ianto, a box that holds all the shit he's seen that he doesn't want to dwell on, because it will make him crazy. Ianto understands, but unlike Jack, who locks his box with forced cheerfulness and optimism, Ianto's is clumsily taped shut with determination and minute forays into happiness, like a Milka bar in the afternoon or a footrub in the bathtub with Lisa.

Lisa doesn't ask about it, because she doesn't want any more grief in her life, she tells them, but she lets them know that if they want to tell her, ever, anything, they can say it, because she has room for that, room for the horrors they see, that they capture in their heads, behind their eyes, and bring home with them. Ianto and Jack vow to never breathe a word.

One night, in the middle of dinner, Jack is telling them some far-fetched story about a Norlon and her amazing spinning vagina, when Lisa takes off her wedding ring and gives it to him. Jack stares at the band of gold in his hand, out flat and shaking, when Ianto finds himself sliding his off his finger and dropping it in that palm, listening to the soft jangle of gold on gold on Jack's skin.

Jack looks at him like he doesn't know what it means, though Ianto knows that he does. Jack likes to call Lisa his Thoroughly Modern Millie, and Ianto his Man Friday. Ianto calls him Wooster and Lisa his Gorgeous Dove. Lisa jokingly refers to Ianto as Slave One. Jack has only recently graduated to Slave Two, a step up from Step N' Fetch It.

Ianto rolls his eyes and sets his chin in his hands, elbows on the table. Lisa simply blinks a few times and then refills her glass of water from the pitcher, an attractive filtration system that Jack has bought for them.

Jack stands and walks to the sideboard, opening one of the ornamental Russian nesting dolls that Lisa had brought back from a trip to Moscow. He clinks the rings into the matryoshka, then assembles the whole set, dolls in dolls. Lisa's eyes are bright. Ianto can feel his heart like a jackhammer and Jack shakes the whole thing a little as if to prove to himself that they are in there, and turns to them with a wry smile.

'Safe keeping,' he says.

*~*~*~*~*~*

LISA

She likes to wake up between Jack and Ianto, but it doesn't happen often, because Jack is restless, and he likes to put on pajama bottoms and climb out on the roof, the one place where she cannot follow him. She tries sometimes, her chair at the bottom of the stairs, and she counts the metal steps up to the roof: there are fifteen of them.

Like right now; the stairwell smells like exhaust and stale cigarette smoke (she too is guilty of smoking out here, but only when she's drinking alone, and that's not often), and that car park smell that concrete places get when they're not properly ventilated. She drums her hands on the arms of her chair and wonders what she should do.

It's five-thirty in the morning and she hadn't heard him leave. His coat and shoes are still there, and so she knows that he's not in the flat or gone back to the Hub. Alec Guinness's face is frozen on the telly screen, where Jack has inexplicably paused 'Bridge Over the River Kwai', presumably to go out to the rooftop.

He's been upset since Suzie has died, of course he would be; they haven't told her much about what happened to Suzie, except that she'd gone round the bend and killed herself. That Suzie'd been behind a spate of recent murders. Lisa has a hard time meshing that with the Suzie that she knew, the Suzie who had been so warm and generous and full of something quirky when she had introduced herself and come over for dinner one evening. Ianto had spilled wine on her and she had laughed, with heart, genuine amusement, patting his arm and saying something about him using up all his grace during the on hours. Lisa had liked that because she often thought Ianto needed to turn himself off. He used to, before London had ended so many things.

Jack has spoken of Suzie once since it had happened, and he'd had that look. Lisa knows that look, because sometimes Ianto has it when he meets her eyes across the room, as if he has failed somehow. She thinks about Jack up there on the roof, brooding about something that he probably couldn't have prevented, or even if he could have, he didn't, and so it's over, and he will turn it over and over again until it eats him inside, rotting. She knows that, God does she know that.

It's an experiment then, Lisa considers, as she pulls her chair flush with the stairwell and levers herself out of her seat and onto the second step. Her chair rolls away because she hadn't put on the brakes, oops. Lisa takes a few deep breaths and reverse presses herself up to the next step. It's not the lifting that is tiresome or difficult, it's the dragging; her heel catches on the step. Her pyjama leg snags on the metal stripping at the edge of the step and she curses when she hears it rip.

It's going to be a long trip up, she decides as she looks behind her.

So she's crying and frustrated and swearing when Jack opens the door to the roof to find her halfway up the stairs, and she just knows that she's bruised her legs, and scraped her knee, most assuredly, and this is the first time since the accident that she's _damaged_ herself. Jack takes the stairs three at a time, crouches down next to her and holds her shoulders still for a second before gathering her up and walking up the rest of the way. He toes open the door and walks out onto the roof, gravel surely digging into, no, cutting his feet with her added weight, but he acts as if he doesn't feel it. He sits them both down on a large, metal air duct, and they stare at what looks like it will become the sunrise.

'That wasn't the smartest thing you've ever done,' he says to her, but it's not chastising. It's factual. Jack has never pitied her. Ever.

She doesn't have a response to that. Well maybe, 'I wanted to see what all the fuss was about you on rooftops.' She snorts. 'Ianto says you're good on rooftops.'

Jack's shoulder bumps hers. In the dim light, when she glances over, she sees that he has a severe case of bed head; it's charming and ridiculous. 'Oh, well, I have experience.'

'I know,' she says to him, 'about the files you destroyed. My files in UNIT.' Jack makes his "Wot? Me? Naaaaah." face and she ignores it. 'It's okay you know, we both know about the damage that happened when Ianto—'

'You can't know that for sure,' Jack says suddenly, 'you have to believe that it's not certain.'

Lisa smiles. 'The road to Hell and all that,' she counters.

He nods, and they look out at the moon, falling into the lightening of the sky as it washes out the stars. Lisa pulls her robe about herself and shudders a little. It's cold, and she can never seem to keep herself warm anymore. And when she is warm, she's roasting. Their thermostat has been getting a work out since they moved to Cardiff, one of the many things that she's grateful Ianto is willing to put up with. Jack's hands rest on his knees and he stares resolutely outward. She wonders if she's interrupting, a little awkward, now, because she can't just stand up and excuse herself. In fact, she considers as she looks at her feet, she isn't sure how she'd get back to her chair without Jack.

Everything that shouldn't feels like a fucking metaphor these days.

Jack sets one of his hands on hers. 'Tell me something I don't know,' he says then, head turning to look at her, and she almost says "Quid pro quo, Clarice," until she remembers that Jack doesn't watch films, not quite, and not serial killer ones, and he probably wouldn't find it funny anyway.

She dredges her mind and wonders what she could think of, when the sun shoots the first rays into the sky, a little sliver in the bottom of her vision.

'The last time we went camping in Brittany,' she says, 'we slept in our clothes, it was so cold.' She pats his hand. 'And when we woke up, a dog was pissing on our tent.'

Jack laughs. Lisa likes his laugh, free and easy, but filled with regret. Regret that she isn't part of, and hopes to never be.

'It was our wedding anniversary,' she whispers. 'No, not quite, that was Monday. But we celebrated early, you know? For the weekend.'

Jack looks back out at the sunrise.

She plows on, because that is the thing to do, really. 'He bought me flowers, and I was arranging them on my desk when they came in and rounded us up.' She pauses with the memory of it. 'Their feet were so loud on the concrete. Heavy. Metal.'

He doesn't say anything. Once Ianto had told her that Torchwood Cardiff hadn't been able to get there in time, but that Jack had known too much about Cybermen, had understood them, hinted about them in ways that made them both wonder if he had seen them elsewhere, perhaps elsewhen.

She squeezes his hand in hers and wishes that she could drum the balls of her feet against the metal vent; it feels like the appropriate thing to do in this conversation, bang on the hollow sheet metal for effect, make it a parody of her past terror.

'Anyway, that was our wedding anniversary,' she finishes. 'And here we are.'

Jack sighs. 'I was married once,' he says softly. 'She was sweet.'

Lisa laughs and hopes that if her laugh is as regret-filled, then it is also as unaccusatory as Jack's. 'Sweet. That doesn't seem like something you'd go for.'

'I have moments.' Jack lets go of her hand and instead wraps his arm about her shoulders, pulling her against him. She hadn't even realised that she's been involuntarily shivering. Somewhere down on the street a car horn blares and a dog launches into a volley of barks. She can see lights go on in the buildings around them as people wake up and start their day in near darkness. It feels as if the very world is waking up, and she wonders if this is why Jack comes up here; it's a reminder that there are other people out there who don't know her, to whom her life is a mystery, inconsequential. It's only fair, she supposes, since she doesn't care about them either. That's the way humans are, anyway.

'Ianto is going to freak out,' Jack says, 'when he wakes up and you're gone.'

Lisa snorts. 'I think that's my line.'

Jack's arm tightens. 'Don't belittle.'

'Just,' she says, 'just give me a minute.'

He lets go of her then and stands, walking away to the edge of the roof and stepping up onto it. Lisa closes her eyes and listens to the sounds of horns and traffic, slow and quiet but growing louder. She can feel the breeze that just the arrangement of the buildings next to each other creates. The duct under her shudders once and then begins to shoot heat out of the vent on the side.

When she opens her eyes, Jack is silhouetted by the rising sun, like some superhero. She wants to call out to him, to tell him to be careful, but she's not his mum, and that would be some sort of new dynamic that she isn't ready to confront. Jack doesn't turn, just steps backwards onto the roof and comes back, broad chest bare like a porno Superman.

'Well, Mrs. Miniver,' he says softly as he gathers her up, 'let's go back down and solve your problem. Think we can get your husband off before he wakes up?'

Lisa ponders their lives in intersecting circles, like Jack has suggested. It is a quandary, the concentric circles of their beings all hooked together, humans into venn diagrams. Her ring finger has never once told her that it is lonely or bereft.

'This bears exploration,' she says, 'he's skittish. Needs a saddle.'

Jack raises an eyebrow but doesn't comment. He carries her to her chair and sits her in it. She lets him push her back to the lift. When they are on, he bends down and kisses her, soft, chaste, completely unfilthy. 'You should go camping again,' he says, 'without the dog piss this time.'

Lisa doesn't follow him to the roof again, but she thinks about it often, when they are at work. She thinks about watching people live their lives through the windows. She thinks about how easy it would be, after all that work, to drag herself over the edge, but her mind is burned with Ianto's screaming face when he pulled her from the wreckage of Torchwood One, and she knows that she can never be the cause of that pain again.

Still, one day when she's been inundated with calls regarding useless things--UNIT breathing down her neck needlessly again—she tucks a pack of Superkings into her jacket pocket and wheels herself to the lift. She thinks about leaving a note, just in case she gets trapped up there, but then the doors open and she gets in the lift, punching the button with her thumb.

Fifteen minutes later, when she opens the door and drags herself through the gravel, he's left her an unfolded beach chair.

Later that night, Ianto kisses her temple and asks her what they should do with their rare free weekend, and she looks up at him, smiling. 'Let's go camping.'

*~*~*~*~*~*

GWEN

Gwen loves Ianto and Jack together. Not in a sexual way. Well, maybe in a sexual way. She loves when they leave together, because she is intrigued at the work-relationship dynamic. She thinks about working with Rhys, and knows that they would end up killing each other, or everyone would go to bed angry. But Ianto and Jack don't even acknowledge their relationship, and it hadn't been until she had walked in on them in Jack's office that she had been able to figure it out.

Sure, "walked in on" implies something sexual, not quite what she had witnessed—an embrace, rather, Ianto's hand on the back of Jack's head, Jack's face buried in Ianto's neck, those soft murmurs, the one thigh pressed in between the other's legs, the little gentle sway of a couple embracing and talking and hesitant to let go.

Imagine her surprise when Owen mentions Ianto's wife one time when the two of them are fucking in the backseat of his car in the middle of the afternoon. She thinks to be offended on Lisa's behalf, but when she comes and Owen calls her his beautiful bitch, Gwen feels sheepish and realises that everything in the world is rather complicated.

But she still wants to meet Lisa of Torchwood One.

So, after Jack and Tosh had got back from 1941, and Jack is morose and wistful, Gwen suggests they all go out. Actually, Owen, still smarting from Diane (and a bullet in the shoulder), has installed himself in the Hub, and he suggests that they all go out without him, Doctor's orders, moment of altruism, use it or lose it, etc. etc. Gwen gives Ianto and Tosh the big-eyed look she'd perfected on her father years ago (and on Rhys, oh so easy). Tosh gives Jack her own version of the big-eyed look (perfected in a manner similar to Gwen's), and Ianto just rolls his eyes and says something about how all the women in his life look like sad clowns in a carnival show.

Later that week, she and Jack and Tosh meet Rhys at a restaurant Ianto has selected, and they wait at the table, dissecting breadsticks and folding their serviettes into animals and in general chatting like normal people, as normal as they can be, for Rhys's sake. He doesn't understand special ops, and they can't tell him anything anyway, but he's happy to talk haulage, and Jack asks him ridiculously flirty questions about "tonnage" and what the best routes are to avoid the police. When Jack excuses himself to the loo, Rhys turns to her, his own eyes wide, and tosses a thumb backwards.

'Your boss?'

'Yup.'

'A little queer.'

Tosh laughs and asks Rhys about his routing system. Jack returns and is almost to his seat when Ianto and Lisa arrive.

No one had told her about the chair. Not that it matters, she tells herself; the presence of it, framework cradling her body as she rolls towards them, adds about fifteen chapters to Ianto, to Jack, to their story, slamming into place like the loading of an ammo mag.

So no, no one had told her about the chair, or the fact that Lisa is a total looker. Gwen doesn't know what she expected, some pale, mousy thing, perhaps. Some scorned cuckolded woman that she could use to feel less affection for Jack and Ianto.

Lisa wheels herself, Ianto behind her with his hands in his coat pockets as if he doesn't trust himself not to push her, steer her. His eyes search the table, the people there. Lisa is almost radiant, though that could be her smile, and her manicured nails click against the rims of her wheels. Her clothes are posh, and her dark hair is short and stylish. Gwen feels vaguely frumpy. Then again, look at Ianto and the way he dresses—why would she have thought Lisa to be any different? They are the epitome of a young couple out for a night on the town. Gwen hides her hands with their scruffy nails under the table.

When Lisa arrives at the table, skidding to a halt at the empty space between Tosh and Ianto's chairs, bumping into it as if she just can't be bothered to stop herself, she reaches out her arms to them. Gwen and Rhys take her hands instinctively, without thinking, and she grasps them, squeezing, her thousand-watt smile working overtime.

'It's about time!' she says, 'Ianto is the worst social planner ever.' Ianto smiles when he slides into his chair, but his eyes are glued to his bread plate. His fingers find Jack's on the table, the barest of brushes.

Jack lets his hand linger there, but his eyes are on Lisa as he reaches across Ianto, leaning on his arm a little, and grabs her wrist, squeezing. 'You look fantastic.'

Lisa gives him that bright smile, and for a second Gwen entertains the thought that the light just reflects from her mouth to his, and they should be filming some sort of toothpaste commercial instead of sitting here waiting for the garcon. Lisa lets go of Rhys and Gwen's hands and when everyone settles back into place, there is a sliding of fingers and arms between Jack and Lisa and Ianto that looks familiar, strange, comfortable and suddenly it all clicks in her head: Jack, Ianto, the intimacy, the leaving together, the comfortable nature of it all.

As everyone gets settled and fusses with flatware and Rhys starts a conversation with Ianto about the Grand Slam, Gwen raises her brows at Tosh and looks at Jack and Ianto. Tosh nods minutely. _Oh really_.

Dinner is about as spectacular as it can be when four of the people suddenly have to leave to go chasing down a bunch of teddy bears that have been exposed to some sort of alien animation gas and subsequently broken out of a local toy store to have a bloody joyride about Cardiff. Lisa's face is gleeful when they all rush about, trying to finish their entrees and stuffing breadsticks in their pockets, but Rhys looks a little put out. As Gwen kisses him goodbye she watches for Ianto and Lisa, but she must have missed it. When they run out of the restaurant, Lisa is already laughing and ordering another bottle, telling Rhys that as Torchwood widows, it's their job to finish the evening with a bang, out of spite.

Gwen knows that he gave her a ride home, but when she asks him what they had talked about, he gives her a smile and waves his hand, noncommittal.

She lets him own it.

She doesn't think about Jack and Ianto and Lisa again until a week later, when she and Jack are in the SUV, waiting for Tosh to finish a trace on a Weevil they'd tagged and released, only to discover that it had resurfaced in Penarth with a little bit of a human flesh fetish.

Jack plays with his wrist strap and she sits in the passenger seat, looking at the traffic up in the viaduct over-pass.

'I've never asked,' she says, 'and you can tell me to stop at any time—'

'Stop.'

'Okay.' She looks at her hands in her lap.

After a thirty-second lapse of silence, Jack snorts. 'I was just testing to see if you would stop,' he says. 'Go on, ask away.'

'You and Ianto.'

'Me and Ianto. Not a question, Gwen.'

She twists her hands in her lap and sighs. 'You and Ianto and Lisa.'

'Me and Ianto and Lisa. Still not a question.'

She glances at him and he is looking at the wrist strap, his fingers pressing buttons. She wonders what he's doing—texting, programming, playing mini-Space Invaders. 'You know what I'm asking,' she says softly.

Jack opens his mouth and then closes it. He lets his wrist go and places both hands on the steering wheel. Then he turns his head to look at her, and his face is dead serious.

'It's complicated,' he says, 'very complicated.'

Their Bluetooths chirrup and Tosh pops up on the line, as if she has the most convenient timing in the world. She gives them a new set of coordinates for the satnav and they buckle in, ready to race to the warehouse and wrestle Janet into the cage in the back. Owen wants to keep her for good this time. He curses at them over the comm, telling them that they better not bang her up too badly. Ianto comes over the comm and says something mild about roughing up Owen's best girl. Jack laughs and Gwen tries not to roll her eyes too hard.

'We're going to earn that astronomical paycheque tonight, I can feel it,' Jack says cheerfully. 'Aren't you excited?'

Gwen checks the location they're headed to: a fish packing plant. Lovely. 'I can't wait,' she tells him and he whistles under his breath.

'Are you happy?' she asks as he turns the ignition over, and her question is almost lost in the quiet roar of the engine.

Jack puts the SUV into gear and pulls out before answering. 'Happiness is relative.' And as he turns into traffic, 'But yeah.'

*~*~*~*~*~*

IANTO

Whilst Jack is gone, Lisa has a health episode. He curses the man's name all the way to hospital, and then he curses himself that he hadn't been paying attention to her enough in the chaos to see that she hadn't been paying much attention to her catherization. Lisa has always been meticulous, so very meticulous, and where she fails from sheer exhaustion or hatred for what has happened to her, Ianto has always prided himself on picking up. But some things, sometimes, had fallen to Jack, just a little, and as he holds her hand in the back of the ambulance, he realises that they have placed their bets on something frightfully unsure.

The doctors assure him that the kidney infection is something that is treatable, and that once the fever has subsided and the antibiotics have had a chance to work, she will be right as rain. But getting the infection to release a hold on her body is always harder when it is systemic like this. He shakes their hands and smiles and nods and thanks them profusely because it makes no sense to be rude, but under his breath he is cursing and vowing to be there for her more.

He tells Gwen and the others that he won't be in for a few days, no matter what they might say, and they don't seem to be put out. Gwen makes reassuring noises into the phone, and all Ianto can think is that Torchwood owes him, anyway, owes him time and patience and pretty much anything it could ever pull out of its massive resources to keep her alive. Owen tells him to ask for certain drugs, and he writes them down on his hand in pen. This is what Jack's absence has reduced him to—scribbling on his skin because he hasn't the foresight to bring paper or his PDA.

Lisa murmurs in her delirium, 'Where are my boys? I need my boys,' and all Ianto can do is hold both of her hands in his, pretending that there are two of him, that one hand is hotter than his own and pulses a reassuring beat into her ashen grip.

Tosh comes to him in the middle of the night, a bag of pasties in her hand, and she sits next to him in the waiting room whilst the nurses change Lisa's sheets and give her a sponge bath. Ianto had wanted to do it himself, but they assure him that they are professionals and that if he especially wants to, he can assist in the next one. In retrospect, he thinks as he accepts the bottle of water Tosh gives him, her fingers already having removed the cap as if he is five, there's no reason not to let them do their jobs.

'I can't help but think that he would be here if he could,' Tosh says, meaning to be comforting but failing miserably. She seems to recognise it then, because she furrows her brows. 'Oh, Ianto, I didn't—'

Ianto pats her arm, thinking about how much better it feels to be comforting someone else instead of being comforted. 'No,' he says, and they watch a very old man creak slowly down the hallway with an IV pole.

'I always thought that you had a good thing,' Tosh says, not looking at him. 'I admit, that for a few seconds I was insanely jealous of Lisa, with the two of you and…well, it's uncharitable.'

Ianto thinks that it's remarkably charming that Tosh would be jealous of a crippled woman in a chair. At least, that's what Lisa would have said, but he understands where she is going. 'We never quite "had" him, obviously,' he says. And then he starts to eat the pasty that she has brought him because that is the right thing to do.

Tosh sighs. Somewhere at the other end of the floor someone calls a code and they watch alarmedly as a crew wheels a crash cart down the hall at breakneck speed. Ianto knows it's not Lisa's room, but he wants to jump up and follow them, watch, make sure that they're not going to turn left. They turn right, and he drops the pasty on the floor in relief. Tosh is there right away, scooping it up in her hand and throwing it into the bin next to her. She opens the bag and deposits a new one into his open palm, closing her fingers over it.

He cannot look her in the eyes.

'You eat that or I'll force it in your mouth,' she says cheerfully.

'You sound like Owen,' he tells her, but he takes a bite and chews it. It's a good pasty, he'll give her credit for finding these secret culinary treasures of Cardiff. In his head he imagines Tosh wandering the streets at night, with her PDA, scanning Chippie Alley for the Best Chips In The Universe.

She stays with him for another hour, not talking about anything at all. The next day Gwen comes and tells him to go home and get changed, get some clothes, take a shower, make something to eat that isn't instant or hasn't come from a machine. Ianto consults the charts (he reads them all, he has since London) and agrees, but he has to take a taxi. Gwen gives him the keys to the SUV and says that she'll stay until he gets back.

He had forgotten how much the SUV is like Jack, or how he associates it with Jack, and he almost punches the sidepanel at the sight of it. But he gets in and sits in the driver's side for a minute, head on the steering wheel because he is trying to smell Jack.

Jack is gone. Has been for three weeks. He isn't coming back.

It had been bad enough when Jack had been cold on the slab, and Ianto had had to go home to tell Lisa, he hadn't been able to say the words then. But Jack had come back from the dead, kissed him there in the Hub in front of everyone, and then gone home to lie in Lisa's arms; Ianto had been thankful that he hadn't had to say that Jack was gone for good. He'd just had to say it a day later, when, after coming back from a coffee run, Gwen had told him that Jack had just disappeared. Ianto isn't stupid, never has been. He knows what that noise had been. He'd checked the footage on the Plass. He hasn't always been with this ragtag backwater coalition, no, he had been Torchwood _London_ ; he knows the TARDIS when he sees and hears it.

'You fucking bastard,' he tells the horn symbol in the dead center of the column.

Oh, even now he can't blame Jack. He will, though, just to feel better. He ignores Jack's things in the spare room, simply shutting the door and knocking on it twice out of some OCD display.

He showers and thinks about Lisa, wanking off even though in the forefront of his mind he understands that she is ill and lying on a bed in a drug haze, and neither of them is there for her. After he dresses, he takes a turn through the house, throwing away small things: her catheter tubing (it would have to be replaced anyway); he gets a bin liner and fills it with a few Military History magazines from the coffee table, a series of sketching notebooks filled with drawings of Ianto and Lisa and others. Ianto takes the trash to the skips and stands there, debating tossing it all out. He could have taken a turn through Jack's room, really, but he hadn't, and even now, he just walks back upstairs with the bag and sets it inside the door of Jack's bedroom, shutting the door and knocking on the wood again. He knows it's not for luck. He doesn't have any more time to waste on being a lovesick jilted girl, because his wife is waiting for him in a hospital bed.

Besides, Lisa might want to burn it all when she gets back. She's always been more vengeful than he is, and he would hate to deprive her of an excuse to set something on fire.

On his way out the door he makes one more stop.

When Lisa wakes up, one of the first things she sees is the ring on her finger again. Ianto turns his with his thumb and stares out the window. He wants to play with it in obvious places, so that everyone can see that it is there, so that if Jack is watching them through some celestial window, he can see that they have closed the gap that he has left.

'You know it's not your fault,' she says to him, and he can't look at her. Instead, he watches a bunch of terminal children hobble about in the garden outside, halfheartedly running after balls or playing jacks on the cracked concrete.

His response is noncommittal. It feels much like the rest of him, except the rest of him is renewing his vows to her. He can feel them wrapping around him, settling around him, like a forcefield coming from the ring itself. What is that superhero with the magic ring? The Green Spectre? The Green Light? That one.

Lisa's fever is gone, and she can have fluids, but they suggest water in very small amounts. When she asks for it, he is more than happy to get it. He's more than happy to serve, to prove that he's her husband, that she is his wife, and they are enough for each other.

'It wasn't a mistake,' Lisa says to him when he hands her the cup of ice water. 'I'd do it again.'

*~*~*~*~*~*

LISA

It has been two months since Jack's return, and only a month since he has begun to spend the night again. Lisa isn't sure if he feels like he has been doing penance for his absence, but his revelations in the dark of the night, sometimes in her arms, sometimes in Ianto's, sometimes sitting by himself in the chair as he stares out the window, tell them much. He tells them about the Doctor, and about the time vortex, and the TARDIS. He tells them about his life on Earth for the last hundred and fifty odd years.

The night that he finishes, he shrugs his shoulders in the moonlight. 'And that's it,' he says.

Ianto doesn't say anything for a long time, as they lie there, and then Lisa reaches out for them both and lays her chin on Jack's chest. 'So you're like Dracula,' she says casually. 'Doomed to walk the earth forever.'

Ianto snorts and Jack sighs.

'Come to me, my brides,' Lisa says in a bad accent, curling her hand like a claw.

'If you get her started, she won't shut up,' Ianto warns Jack, his face muffled by a pillow.

Jack shudders, the tears drying on his face. 'You're amazingly unsympathetic.'

Lisa punches his shoulder, then props herself up with her arms so that she can look him in the eye. 'Forgive me if I have little sympathy for someone who can live forever.'

'You're taking this rather well,' Jack says dryly. She can hear his eyeroll.

She sighs against him then, and she feels one of Ianto's hands reach out to her, caressing the back of her neck. 'No, I'm sorry, but what should we say? Forgive me for being selfish, but I'm rather just glad that you're still alive.'

Jack watches her pull herself up his body and when her mouth finds his, his lips are damp with tear tracks and salt. His tongue is just like she has remembered, dreamed about. 'I am sorry,' she says against his cheek. 'There's nothing I can do, but I am sorry.'

Ianto brushes his cheek against Jack's other shoulder. 'I'm sorry, also,' he murmurs, 'that this conversation is so very sentimental.'

And then he strokes Jack to hardness so that Lisa can suck him off, and they spend the rest of the night forgetting about immortality and death and all the frightening things that come with them.

In the morning he is still there, and Lisa lets him make her breakfast. She even lets him wash the glasses. He doesn't break a single one.

Things have returned to normal, or what passes for Torchwood normal: aliens; guns; sex gas; a frozen soldier thawed out; an invasion of ants bent on taking over the Millennium Centre; a tear in the fabric of time that they close with scientific duct tape. Lisa finishes her job for UNIT and starts a new one that requires a daily commute, and she cannot wait to get out of the house every day. Gwen and Rhys come over once every two weeks, sometimes with Tosh or Owen in tow, play cards or drink, like the twentysomethings they are. Jack hovers in the background sometimes, or stays at the Hub, watching the Rift twist and turn in place, ready to churn out something new and fascinating and deadly or even boring and useless.

She likes Gwen, more than she ever liked Suzie, not as much as she adores Tosh. Then again, she realises as she watches their guests, she shouldn't compare them, because it had never been a contest, and it still isn't. She just likes having people in the flat.

Gwen, and her man Rhys, they sprawl on the sofas with the laziness that comes with being at home wherever you are, and Lisa can identify with that in some ways, because Cardiff will never be her home, just some place that she has learned to stretch out in. Gwen yawns and lifts her arms above her head and her tongue is kittenish, arching up from the lower palate, and Lisa watches when Jack stares at it.

She wants to give Gwen to Jack. Not as a toy, and not discounting Rhys, but unlike herself, scarred in mind and body, and Ianto scarred in spirit, Gwen is unmelted snow, the kind that feeds into streams when the frost melts, the kind people take pictures of to slap on a post card. Rhys beside her is hale and husky and manly, and he probably smells like ale and cologne and motor oil. Lisa shivers despite herself.

But Jack respects the boundary, and Lisa can't help but wonder if he almost fetishises it. She has stopped trying to guess at what Jack wants. Even now, as his things take up their closets and shelves, he presses them together some nights, sliding from the bed and patting their hips, a silent message that they are fine without him, that he is content to not be there, that he wants them to be there. She usually finds him later, out on the roof.

Tonight, Lisa watches him track Gwen's movements through the flat, and she wonders if it's only a matter of time, or if this is something that can be sated from afar. She wonders what she would think if Jack and Gwen decided to have sex, or if Gwen and Rhys invited Jack into their bed. She isn't sure that it would ever happen, but she wonders about it anyway.

Then Jack kisses her cheek when everyone leaves, and she lets him lead her to bed.

One night there is a knock on her door and the rattle of keys, and she knows that it is not one of the boys (her boys), and Rhys sheepishly pokes his head in and says something about being told to look in on her and to bring a curry. She doesn't curse at him, because he is, well the messenger, and she has been that before. It's tandoori, and she likes tandoori, so she forgives everyone, especially when Rhys uncovers the little Styrofoam box of jilebi, and they settle in with dinner on the sofa to watch the game, and then an old Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.

They complain about being Torchwood widows. Lisa doesn't explain how complex that is, and she has no encouraging words for him.

Rhys slides further down on the sofa. 'You worked for Torchwood, yeah?' he asks, and she wonders how to respond to that. Because it's going to go to the bad place.

'Yeah,' she says off-hand. 'In London.'

He shifts and sips from his glass. 'How was that, then?' He waves his hand, and she knows what he wants to know.

She refills her wineglass. 'I was injured there. Work accident.' And when his face darkens, she hastens to add, 'But it was a singular incident. Nothing that would happen here.'

She kicks herself a little, because she wonders what all Rhys has seen Gwen come home with. She knows that Gwen had been shot in the line of duty last year, but she doesn't know if Rhys knows that. She knows that Gwen had been almost sucked dry by Suzie, and a few other close calls. Some part of her hates the idea that Rhys doesn't know what he's in for, what his fiancée is getting herself into every day. Lisa knows what Ianto is in for.

Her wheels groan a little when she shifts, lifting herself from the chair and onto the sofa, and she makes a mental note to go in and have it checked out.

Rhys finishes his beer and goes for a refill, and Lisa watches him with fondness. He's strapping, and in another life she might have had a greater appreciation for it. Her last boyfriend before Ianto had been a construction worker, Thaddeus, and he had had these _shoulders_ , well, she has an appreciation for bulk. Ianto is all whippiness and ardour. Jack, well, Jack is just himself. If she had to describe him, she would say, "A coil of sex."

'Can I ask?' he says when he settles down. 'You know—'

'Oh,' she says, 'there was a structural flaw in the building, and I didn't get out in time.' She tries to look serious and dismissive, because everything that she cannot say is so fucking terrifying that she has a hard time talking about it. UNIT had sent both she and Ianto to a therapist, one with clearances, and they had talked it out in their six allocated sessions. It was just enough to scrape the skin from the top of the custard, but not much else.

She thinks that she would need about fifteen more years just to explain the _noise_ , the noise of their voices. In her dreams all she hears is "EXTERMINATE".

Ianto had repainted the Delete key on her computer so that now it says "erase".

Rhys is sympathetic. He wisely changes the conversation, and after a few more beers and glasses of wine he turns to her and says, 'I think Gwen is having an affair with Jack.'

Lisa chokes on her wine, and that is the worst thing she could have done, because now he must think it's true. He frowns into his beer and sniffs. His t-shirt is riding up a little, and she can see one of his love handles. She wants to grab it, but he is too far away. She settles for throwing a remote control at him.

'Gwen isn't having an affair with Jack,' she says, 'because he's too busy here,' she adds because he would ask how she knows, and she'd have to tell him anyway. She's glad that she's not very very drunk, because she might have blurted out that Gwen used to be fucking Owen, but that's not her secret to tell, and now that she knows it's over, she is sure that Gwen would be glad to never speak of it again. She wonders if Gwen beats herself up over it.

She doesn't blame Gwen, really, she thinks for a second when Rhys looks into his glass and she understands that he knows nothing, nothing that Gwen has seen, that Lisa has seen, and that is in its own way a blessing and a curse. She wonders who Gwen talks to about Torchwood. Probably no one. Maybe Jack. She wonders if she shouldn't invite her out for lunch, maybe with Tosh, and the three of them can be girls and have girl talk: shoes, menstrual cycles, Bechdel, aliens.

'You two, you three, you….' Rhys's head wraps around the reality of Lisa's arrangement adeptly. She scrolls her hand in a circle, partly to say, "Hurry up, get there", partly to say, "Yeah, what you're imagining".

'Ooh, you lucky girl you,' he says, winking, but she can see that he doesn't believe her. That's okay anyway, as long as he doesn't think that his girl is banging Jack.

Later on, when she emerges from the loo, Rhys has fallen asleep on the sofa. Lisa covers him with an afghan, texts Gwen, and goes to bed. In the morning they have hangover eggy toast and trundle off to their jobs, vowing to do this again the next time they are deserted by their lesser halves.

A few weeks later Ianto doesn't come home, and he doesn't call. Lisa emails him, and then she tries his mobile. It's not that she doesn't trust him, but he doesn't like her to worry, especially since the last time Jack had left.

Jack rarely if ever calls, so that doesn't bother her at all.

She tries Rhys, and he tells her that he had seen Jack and Gwen, but that Gwen is acting strange, doesn't remember him, and he sounds panicked. She tries to talk him down, she wants to talk to Jack, but he's not there. He doesn't answer his mobile.

Some time later she manages to get Ianto to pick up, and when he says, 'Hello?' she starts to yell at him.

'You know, sir, you should call your wife when you think you're going to be too busy to come home. I know it wasn't covered in the wedding vows, but it is the _human_ thing to do—'

'I'm sorry, who is this?'

Lisa checks at the number display on her work phone. 'Ianto?'

'Yes?' It's cautious.

'It's Lisa.'

'I'm sorry, but I think you might have the wrong—'

'Your _wife_.'

There is a long pause. 'You must be mistaken. I'm afraid I'm not m—'

She hangs up, then sits there in her chair and stares at the phone. Rhys had said that Gwen didn't remember him. What had happened?

The idea that Ianto doesn't remember her is chilling. Had they been playing with retcon? She cannot imagine that Gwen would want to forget Rhys, so it has to be a mistake. Does anyone there remember her? Does Jack? Owen? Tosh? She wants to try their numbers, but she's afraid.

She's going to wait two more days, and then she's going to call Martha Jones, the new UNIT doctor, the one who knows Jack from…from somewhere.

She sits in the bathroom and stares at the wallpaper, the red flowers. She cleans the Peristeen, but even as she does it, her eyes can't seem to leave the blooms scrawled across the walls. Then she turns on the shower, and lets it run hot until there is only cold water. She digs implements out of Ianto's tool box and locates a roll of duct tape. She pulls the mop from the closet and sets about taking care of what she has decided is one of her major life issues.

In the middle of the night, she gets a phone call from Ianto, and when she presses the receiver to her ear she mumbles something like, 'You better be stranded in Svalbard, or have an extremely good excuse, Mister.'

'Lis?' he whispers, and she shoots to her side, because she can't sit up like she used to, not with her leg muscles to balance her. As dramatic gestures go, it's the best she can muster.

'Babe?'

'Lis oh thank god,' he says, his voice a little louder. 'Lis we all lost two days. Have I called you?'

Lisa groans. 'Bloody Torchwood. No, baby, no you haven't.' The clock reads four in the morning. 'Is everyone all right?'

She can hear clattering in the background, Owen yelling something. Ianto sighs. 'Yeah, I think we're okay. I just wanted to check on you. I'll—we'll--be home soon.'

When they stumble in, it is close to six in the morning. They seem to be intact, and they don't remember anything, they say, it looks like they have retconned themselves. Ianto sits on the edge of the bed and stares like a ghost. Lisa runs her hands along his shoulders, planting kisses on his shoulder blades through his shirt. Jack leans against the windowsill and crosses his arms, looking out into the early morning.

'I don't remember, but I feel, hrm,' Jack says. Ianto nods without looking at him.

'I feel as if I should be apologizing for something, but I don't know what,' Ianto says, rubbing his temples with his fingertips. Lisa vows to never say a word, because he would be horrified, and he doesn't need any more grief.

Jack shoves off from the wall and crawls on the bed, setting his head in her lap. 'I think we all need a lie-in. Do you want me to call work, tell them you're playing skivving off?'

Lisa rolls her eyes. 'UNIT will love that.'

Ianto snorts. '"This is Jack Harkness",' he says in his bad American accent, '"my wife can't come in today because she's making up for lost time".'

Lisa's hands freeze and Ianto tenses as soon as the words are out of his mouth. Her eyes rivet to Jack's, because this could go so many ways.

Instead, Jack just yawns. 'I'll do it,' he says, 'just say the words.' The clock in the living room chimes six-thirty.

Ianto's muscles relax and she feels herself smile a little. Ianto stands and unbuttons his shirt, slipping his tie from his neck and throwing it towards the dry cleaner bin as he moves towards the en suite. She loves that shirt, she decides. Ianto looks beautiful in this shade of red. Jack wraps his arms about her waist and groans into her side.

'Oh, go ahead and do it,' she tells him, pulling her mobile from her pocket. 'It will be worth it to see their faces tomorrow.'

Jack flips the mobile open and hits her three speed dial, smiling.

'Lis,' Ianto calls from the bathroom, 'what happened to the wallpaper?'

 

*~*~*~*~*~*

GWEN

She hates the dress, she decides, but it's a miracle there's a wedding at all, after the day they've had. But Rhys is heroic and brave, and Jack and Ianto and the rest use the big gun, and everything is remarkably…saved. No one is dead but the bad guy. Super Torchwood to the rescue.

She lets Jack spin her out on the dance floor, and she can feel the heat radiating from his arm as it is wrapped about her waist. Tosh and Owen whirl past them, dancing impossibly fast to what is actually a rather slow song. Jack holds her hand curled to his chest, and it creates a distance in between them that she both hates and appreciates.

At times like this she tries to imagine him as her older brother, but that never makes her feel better.

'So, what will you do while I'm gone?' she asks, and the music turns over, something even slower. She sees Ianto at the turntable and can't restrain a small smile. Somewhere behind her, Lisa is chatting with her bridesmaids at a table. Rhys is taking his mother out for a turn.

'Oh, the usual,' Jack says, mock lost in thought, 'pizza, Ianto, save the world a couple of times.' And they laugh.

She wants to ask. She has before, but she just can't bring herself to, not now. Jack's hand presses on her waist again, and she realises that in this moment, with Ianto's horrible song selection playing, she wants Jack. With her rings glinting on his shoulder.

Rings don't mean much to Jack, she knows. And that is petty. Once Ianto had told her that Jack is sex-scented. They'd had a few, and Jack had been back at the Hub, and Lisa and Rhys had been giggling and fighting over the controls to Sonic the Hedgehog in the living room, and Gwen and Ianto had sat on the floor in the kitchen, and he had told her about Jack and his _ways_. To be fair, she had asked, and he'd been drunk enough to indulge her.

It's hard to keep all that from swimming to the surface right now.

'Will you miss me?' she jokes, batting her eyelashes.

'Always,' he replies, and she realises that he is dead serious.

Well, that's hard to respond to. She doesn't have to, because Ianto cuts in, and when she tries to step up to him, he turns towards Jack and they have an awkward split-second of scuffling as to who is going to lead and who will follow. Rather, Jack's hands move to follow, but Ianto gets there first, and Jack sets his hand on Ianto's waist with a sigh and a crooked smile, as if this is an argument they've had before. Gwen covers up her smile with her hand and seeks out their third.

They are still pressed close together, swaying to the music, when she finds Lisa and sits down next to her. Gwen watches her watch the two of them, her brown eyes darting over the lines of their bodies. Is she jealous? Is it the embrace? Or is it the dancing in general? Gwen realises with a little bit of shame that Lisa might have other things to be bitter about other than Jack and Ianto's closeness. She tries to follow the other woman's line of sight. Is it Ianto's hand on Jack's waist? Jack's feet as they turn slowly?

She wants to say something, but she knows that anything she might say would be insensitive, probably.

'So, married lady, any advice?' she asks, because truth, that wouldn't be unwelcome. If there is anyone whose advice would probably be the most helpful, actually, it would be Lisa, who she still thinks of as "Lisa from Torchwood One". Owen once called her "cyber Lisa", and she can't stop herself from thinking that too, when she sees Lisa at the flat when they arrive sometimes, wheeled into her desk, headset on, wearing the silver gloves she uses to handle UNIT's illuminated projector keyboard.

Now, Lisa looks her in the eye and sips from her champagne glass. 'Don't ever lie to him,' she says, 'except when you do.'

Gwen knows exactly what she means. It's Torchwood, binding them all together in lies and secrets and an openness of spirit that she has never had with other humans. She knows things about Owen and Tosh and Ianto and Jack that she shouldn't even know about her husband, her family. She wonders sometimes if she shouldn't marry them all instead. Maybe she already has.

Her eyes seek out Rhys again, and there he is, laughing with her mother, spinning on the dance floor. He passes Jack and Ianto, winks at them, and she understands then, that he is hers and hers alone, not Torchwood's, and that is in itself a small measure of happiness. Looking at him in his dapper tie and suit paints her insides with comfort and anticipation for a nice two weeks away in which she will not call home, will not call Jack or Owen or Tosh, not even Ianto and Lisa. She and Rhys will be two people in love, free to run and forget and roll about in sheets and not even get dressed if they don't want to. And she cannot say that for anyone else here.

Lisa places her hand over Gwen's, their wedding bands clinking against each other. She thinks idly again, how rings don't mean much to Jack. 'It's worth it,' Lisa says, though her eyes are glassy. 'It really really is.'

*~*~*~*~*~*

JACK

After the Skypoint incident, Ianto turns to him and says something about how the flats are rather nice, and that if they can ever get it cleared out, Lisa would love the penthouse. Jack understands the wording completely, and he cannot disagree.

Gwen and Rhys are married, back from their honeymoon and trying on houses for size. Gwen tells Jack in the car that she isn't quite interested in having a house, not quite, since then she'll have to clean it, and he jokes and says something like, 'Well, doesn't Rhys do that _now_?' and she doesn't speak to him for three hours of a sixhour stakeout. Apparently Rhys does, but they don't talk about it. Jack doesn't quite care, actually, who does the cleaning in any given relationship, as long as it isn't him. He had his years of hospital corners in the military. Now it's so much easier to pull the blankets up over the pillows and pretend everything is tucked in (This is also the Lisa method.).

So after Besnik Lucca is fully charged and his condo goes on the market, Ianto and Toshiko pull some computerised strings, and within a week, the papers have been signed. Jack and Ianto wheel Lisa in for her first look without ever having shown it to her, but there is little to worry about; there's no floral wallpaper in sight.

Lisa loves the plants and the patio and the birds. She loves the wide hallways and the accessibility and she loves them both, she says, when they kneel down beside her and she wraps her warm arms around them, and Jack takes her mouth with his. Ianto touches Jack's neck and face while they kiss, and Jack knows that he is impatient, urgent, eager to get in on it too, to have her approval (Ianto always wants her approval, as if he is afraid that she will never give it, when she does, she always does.).

Lisa hires movers, and one day Ianto and Jack simply come home to a different place. It's surreal, actually—two days before his room had been in a small Grangetown flat with bad plumbing and inadequate wiring, and the next he's moved on up, like that Jeffersons show from America (Jack blames Alex and his love of American sitcoms for this bit of useless knowledge that no one he knows will understand.). Ianto prods around the kitchen, rearranges the freezer so that everything is where he likes it. Jack hides a few firearms in places where he thinks they will be unobtrusive and useful.

Lisa and Jack excitedly set up the hot tub two days after they move in, and they spend another day explaining to Ianto how no one will see him. Jack illustrates this by stripping down and walking about the entire outdoor garden patio, hands on hips. Ianto locks them out there, and to spite him they have sex in the hot tub, with lots of noises.

He isn't sure when the change happened in Ianto. Sometime after they had lost time, maybe around the wedding, or maybe it was when Owen had died, and…come back. Ianto has always been skittish, not nervous, but pulled back, hesitant. Lisa moves forward for him, she is the one who reaches out and pulls things towards them both.

That night, Jack sits on the very topmost roof and listens to them down in the garden below. He has a Marlowe novel, a booklight and a box of blueberries from Tesco's, a gift from Toshiko, and he intends on eating them in peace. It doesn't hurt that if he lies on his back, there is nothing above him, not even light pollution.

The Rift has been quiet, so that means it's only a matter of time before something bubbles out of it, hopefully in some collectible corporeal form, and not in a gaseous or invisible state. Jack thinks about how lucky they are that they've never actually had to deal with the ******, the noiseless, (tasteless, incidentally) and very very invisible beings from [s]tar [o]ne. There are other things that Jack would prefer never show up (in his dreams for the past few months he has been twelve, and when he wakes his hand reaches for something that isn't there, but should be), so he supposes that it's only a matter of time.

Jack wonders if, as he gets older and older, he will eventually be able to wish events to happen. If he ever does, he decides that he's going to found a free love colony and get laid a lot. And grow fruit. Everyone loves fruit.

'You need to stop worrying about it,' Lisa says as one of them slides the door shut to keep the bugs out of the house. Jack lowers the book and listens to the sound of plates being set on the glass table.

Ianto must have sighed, or rolled his eyes, because Lisa responds. 'That's not right. You know it's not right.' She pauses for a long time. 'And it's not fair. Not to Jack. Or me.'

'This isn't about you, or Jack, or anyone else.' Ianto sounds gravelly, as if he has been smoking or crying, or drinking heavily. Jack doesn't smell smoke, even though he knows that Lisa has started again. He keeps meaning to yell at her about it, but there are so many other things to worry about, that it's nothing.

'Defleeeeeeeeeeeeeecting,' Lisa sings. 'Lying liar who lies,' she adds, and it's a joke, a secret joke that Jack only knows about because they had told him the Debenham's story, the one where Ianto had tried to impress Lisa by telling her that his father was a master tailor when he really worked at a department store. Jack had decided that he preferred the story because it made role-play more fun, and once they had even played "The Randy Tailor Hides the Thimble" (Lisa had named it that, on a whim.). But the joke is still there, adding layers to Ianto and what he feels he needs to do to get what he wants.

As far as Jack is concerned, all Ianto needs to do is breathe and smile.

'I don't think I can keep up with you,' Ianto says, 'You're both brilliant, and fast and I feel like I'm lagging behind.'

'How is a racing metaphor even applicable?' Lisa asks, her voice rough and exasperated. Jack hears the clink and scrape of forks on plates. Ah, they finally broke out that cheesecake. Jack almost interrupts them before he remembers that they can't know he's there. It's rude to eavesdrop, no matter how accidental. But he _really_ wants cheesecake.

Ianto mumbles something noncommittal.

'Look, whatever you think, Jack and I aren't going to run away without you,' Lisa says. 'You know that, right?

Jack rolls onto his stomach and peers over the edge of the roof as noiselessly as he can, feeling strangely like his ten-year old self eavesdropping on his parents with Gray, hiding in the dunes and listening for hints and snatches of their own names in the conversation. He'll childishly admit that there is some secret thrill in listening to a conversation that involves oneself that one is not meant to hear.

Whatever easiness they have had has been shaken by something, something, a strain in the fabric. Their fabric actually, some slipshod thing that they had woven together out of faulty and defective strands that they had each brought to the table. Jack thinks that if they are indeed true to this comparison, then the thing that they had formed, while beautiful and strong, was not made for long term—like a blanket left in the back of a sun bleached car will light-rot after a few months.

He doesn't know what Lisa thinks of that, but it is obvious what Ianto thinks, as he sniffles into his cheesecake, and Lisa forces herself to breathe heavily and steadily to keep herself from crying.

Jack shakes his head. Birthing pangs.

Because really, they're not some bolt of fabric. Jack lays his chin on his hands and thinks about the fall of Lisa's hands on the arms of her chair, of Ianto's little forehead crinkles he gets when he cleans the stovetop. He remembers a conversation on a rooftop once, in which Lisa had told him that she didn't like to imagine the future, and another one, in the quiet darkness of the Hub, in which Ianto had told him that he liked things to be set, planned out. Jack likes things that come in sets, actually, one for each side, like book ends. He finds it helpful if people come that way too. Some of the best people he's known came in a set: Gerald and Harriet, Greg and Cam, the Doctor and Rose, the Doctor (again) and Martha.

Jack is bad at being a bookend, because he always slides off the shelf (He does look attractive bound in leather, though.).

Finally, Lisa reaches across the table for Ianto's hand, pulling it forward and kissing it. 'It's about you,' Lisa says. Her hand squeezes his and she glances up then, at Jack, purposefully, deliberately, before looking back at Ianto. Jack cannot see his face, but Ianto is a messy crier, so he can imagine what it looks like. 'It's always been about you, babe.'

Ianto shrugs one shoulder.

He's difficult. Jack wants to intervene, but this isn't his issue, and he just rolls onto his back and thinks about how being stuck here, even voluntarily, is sometimes a mystery. He drowns out the rest of their conversation, because that's not for his ears, and he's nosy, but not that nosy.

The next morning, Jack is contemplating his coffee cup with the stripes as he sits at his desk. Why is it his cup? When had they decided that it was his? Had he just chosen it from the tray too many times without thinking about it? And if so, is there something inherently _about_ this cup that he likes, on an aesthetic level? Does he care? Should he care? Jack thinks that just to be contrary, to show how much it doesn't matter he should go get another cup and transfer his coffee to it, but that's too much effort. Also, the ceramic is warm, and his hands curve around it _just so_ and—oh hell, it's his mug.

Ianto clears his throat and Jack looks up then. 'Is there something wrong? Do you need a warm up?' He starts to rise, but Jack waves a hand.

'No. You know I—' he stops, looking at Ianto, and then the mug, and then he realises that Ianto had decided that this is his mug. Somewhere Ianto had decided, because Ianto is the one who gives it to him. And subsequently Jack had assumed that it was his so now he just reaches for it.

Ianto raises his brows, half-out of his chair, hands holding his weight on the arms. 'Yeah?'

Jack opens his mouth. 'Ianto, I—'

'Good morning!' Gwen says cheerily as she enters the conference room and picks her coffee mug up from Ianto's tray and gives him a smile and a pat before settling into her chair. 'Are we doing those figures today?'

Ianto glances at Jack and furrows his brows. It's his version of, "Are we done here?" and Jack nods. Gwen doesn't even notice that she's interrupted something, but Jack is glad that she did, because this was not the time and place to say what he had been about to say. What he had been about to say needs a time and place. A _specific_ time and place, because like soufflé, they need a lack of shouting, and they need a steady heat to effectively set. He watches Ianto lean forward and slide the papers to Gwen, noting about the Rift and the spikes and the police; he sits back and sips his coffee, thinking about times and places and meanings. The meaning of three words, the meaning of the Hub, the SUV, the penthouse, the coffee cup in his hands, a piece of cheesecake left in the fridge with his name written on it in raspberry syrup, discovered after everyone else in the flat had gone to bed. Ianto's cursive 'J' and the way it hooks _just so_.

He waits three days, one for each word. It's not on purpose. The time never seems right, actually. They're at work too much and that's a bad location, and then they're naked too much, and that is a bad time. And then Lisa is there, and she is a lovely audience, but it has to be _just him_. Ianto needs to hear it himself, with just himself, because that will make it more real.

It dances in Jack's mouth like a melting hard sweet. For three days.

He's thinking about it as he combs his hair in the mirror and Ianto finishes shaving one morning. Lisa is still passed out in the bed, because she had drunk eight shots of Akvavit on a dare the night before while out with her "UNIT buddies", and Jack is just thankful that she hasn't been booting all night. Ianto leans in closer to the mirror and narrows his eyes, but he's not drawing the blade up.

'I have gray hair,' he says dully.

Jack doesn't bother to look. He doesn't. 'No you don't.' It's the light, probably. 'It's the light in here.'

Ianto still has the razor pressed to his throat, right where his carotid artery is, actually, up where he will drag it across his hyoid bone and—

'I don't think so. My god, that's pathetic,' he says and then he resumes shaving while still shaking his head, and then his hand jolts away from his face and he winces. 'Oh fuck.'

Jack hands him a wad of loo roll and stands there while Ianto presses it to his neck. The paper comes away red. Ianto is still looking at his hair. 'Mind you, I always knew I would go gray, but I truly didn't think it would be at twenty-six—"

'I love you,' Jack says suddenly, eyes on Ianto's handful of red tissue. As soon as the words are out of his mouth, his brain does the claxon of "WRONG PLACE WRONG TIME WRONG EVERYTHING DANGER JACK HARKNESS DANGER DANGER", but there is nothing to do but plow on where angels fear to…plow. 'I do,' he adds, 'love you, you know. I don't think I've ever said it, and I guess that—'

Ianto claps a hand over his mouth and smiles. 'Now you are done, and it is fine.'

'What are you two on about?' Lisa grouses, wheeling in and shaking her head. 'Ianto, you're bleeding.'

Jack looks at her then, her spiky hair and the creases from the pillow on the side of her face. 'I love you, Lis.'

Lisa glances from Ianto to Jack, then back to Ianto, to Jack. Maybe it is too early for her, for this for her. She lifts her hands from the wheels and shrugs.

'You say this now. Right now when I'm like this,' she adds, gesturing to her pajamas and her hair and her face. 'You have the worst timing ever.'

Jack ducks his head and regards her through his lashes. Her contacts are out, but she's not blind enough that she can't see that. 'Doesn't it mean more now, while you're all,' he pauses, searching for the word, 'hungover and gross?'

Behind him, Ianto ties his tie. He can hear the catching of silk on silk. Lisa watches Ianto over his shoulder, then gestures that Jack sit down, so he lowers the toilet lid and perches. She takes both of his hands in hers and leans forward.

'I love you, Jack Harkness,' she says softly, 'but so help me God, if you don't repeat this conversation at a better time, I'm going to have your balls on a plate.' And she winks. 'A non-sexy plate.'

Jack smiles then, he can feel things clicking into place. 'How about tonight, after pudding, before Ianto discovers that Goldfinger is on the telly?'

'It's Moonraker,' Ianto calls from the bedroom, then appears, buttoning his waistcoat. 'We can skip that one.'

Jack lets Lisa roll around to her reply in her own time. One of her hands lets go of his and brushes a stray nothing from his shoulder before she pats his cheek. 'I'll pencil you in. Now both of you leave me the fuck alone.'

Ianto rolls his eyes and Jack grins his way out of the bathroom, but he can hear her muttering under her breath, 'Boys.'

Soon after they do that flat-warming party thing, because Lisa says they should show off their "swanky new digs". She orders a bunch of food so they won't have to cook, despite what Ianto mockingly calls "the kitchen of the fifty-third century" in their house. Jack smiles and tells them that in the fifty-third century they have the food beamed into their stomachs, and Lisa says "Where's the fun in that?" and that causes a giant exchange about what the hell the future will be like.

Lisa says she doesn't care what the rest of the universe is like, but that if someone doesn't invent the Excessive Pleasure Machine, she'll be disappointed.

Jack makes a mental note.

Gwen and Rhys show up with a bottle, and Toshiko meanders in, sprawling on the floor in her skirt and heels, resting her feet on the coffee table, and Lisa plays a little jazz fusion for her. Jack lounges in the doorway and thinks to himself that he wants to have them all here, so that he can love them all, so that they can love each other. It's a maudlin thought, that; Toshiko is such a solitary creature, for all that she is looking for love, and Owen, being dead, well, he won't let anyone ever love him again, and that is just as well.

When he wanders away, he doesn't think that he will be caught as he sneaks one of Lisa's piss-poor cigarettes. He misses them sometimes, actually, no matter how nasty they are. They make him think of The War, and opening his rations pack and seeing them there, as reliable as the dawn and the death of the man sitting next to you.

'They've discovered that they all know how to play Hearts,' Rhys says, and Jack realises with a start that he's about to have a conversation with Gwen's husband, without anyone else. This has to be some sort of milestone.

Rhys hands him a beer and sits next to him out on the patio, groaning and rubbing his shoulders. 'Well, you're all sorted here, aye?'

Jack swills the beer and remembers why he doesn't drink, but he restrains the face he wants to pull, instead setting the bottle on the glass tabletop. 'Looks like.'

'They're rather chuffed,' Rhys says lightly, and Jack might be reading too much into it, but it sounds like what Rhys means is, "Don't fuck this up, old man."

He takes one last drag on the cigarette and puts it out in the plants off to the side, stuffing the butt into his shirt pocket to throw away inside. The acrid smell of it assaults his nose, so he moves it to another pocket. 'Happiness is relative,' is what he tells Rhys, distractedly before it occurs to him that he doesn't really mean it. It's one of his old chestnuts that he uses to fill empty space.

Rhys snorts. 'You sound like Gwen.'

*~*~*~*~*~*

IANTO

'It's funny,' Ianto says, as they move boxes of Gwen and Rhys's things to storage, 'that this would happen this way.'

Gwen tosses a broken lampshade at him, apologising afterwards even though she is angry and not sorry at all, and still more than a little irate that her neighbors couldn't manage to fix their pipes and wiring. The sodden, slightly singed nature of their flat (with a patch of mould in the lounge that Ianto would swear has always been there) is sad and pathetic, really. Rhys good-naturedly tosses salvageable things in boxes and Gwen throws things out the window right into the skip. Ianto tries it a few times—therapeutic, tossing one's life right in the bin. He's pretty sure if he and Lisa would try that now, they'd accidentally kill someone's poodle.

Jack likes to supervise the moving process, though he'll gladly compete with Rhys for hauling bragging rights, carrying two boxes at once. Rhys points to the side of the lorry, Harwood's Haulage, and pretty much raises an eyebrow, and Jack capitulates; he's been outgunned.

It's only until they buy a house, and really, that won't be that long, a few weeks. It's easier than staying in a hotel, and Rhys and Lisa seem to have a rapport. They probably bitch about the rest of them when they're out all the time.

Tosh and Jack head back to the Hub to relieve Owen, and Ianto and Rhys drive the lorry to the storage place to unload all their things. Gwen takes the things they need over to unpack in the third bedroom at the penthouse. Over the comm, Jack makes rude noises about how it's only a matter of time before they can convince Tosh to move in. Ianto ignores him, but he leaves the comm on. He notices that Jack says nothing about Owen, but Ianto is sure that it's in there, some master plan. Some giant incestuous plan.

Ianto had rather facilitated that when he'd suggested they buy such a huge place, he can't help but think, in a 'if you build it, they will come' sort of way.

Gwen and Rhys are barely settled in when they get the signal at the abandoned building site, and Ianto wishes in retrospect that there had been some sort of ominous sound effect to give him a heads up on how bad the next twenty-four hours would be starting with a building falling on his head and ending with Tosh bleeding out on the floor of the autopsy theatre.

It nags at him that he hadn't got to say goodbye, really, especially to Owen, who he sometimes thought could have been him, if he had lost Lisa at Canary Wharf.

The Skypoint is blessedly safe when Hart--when Gray--blows everything up, and Ianto is grateful that Lisa is one thing he doesn't have to worry about in the weeks of clean up. He works until he can't anymore, cleaning Tosh's body and filing it away, rerouting the Rift calculations as much as he can without having Tosh's sublime brain, tearing down the chains that Hart had put up on the walls.

By the time they get to Tosh's video message, tucked away in the computer like finding a twenty-pound note in the laundry, Ianto is ready to drop.

At some point he wakes up in the Hub, wakes up from a dream of having sex with Jack in a pool of Tosh's blood, and he sits up on the couch to see the back of Lisa's chair in his line of vision. He scrubs at his eyes and almost falls when he tries to stand. Lisa is in her chair, he can see her now, black hair and black shirt so dark that she blends into the background of the Hub, leaning forward, talking to someone.

By the time he gets over there, Lisa is chuckling softly, and he rounds her chair to see that she and Rhys are leaning over a folding table of blueprints. They look up when he stands there, feeling as if he is underdressed and overdressed and in desperate need of a shower. He's probably all of these.

Lisa points to the empty chair on her left. It occurs to him that he hasn't hugged her, kissed her, held her since the—the everything. Instead, he drops into the chair and lays his hands in his lap. Rhys leans back and sips from a half-empty can of Irn-Bru.

The Hub feels empty. Jack and Gwen are out somewhere, obviously. He's only minutely worried that they hadn't woken him. It occurs to him that this is the first time Lisa has been in Torchwood Three, and he curses himself for not asking her if she is okay, if it bothers her. He leans forward, putting his fingers on the edge of the table, but she just smiles.

'Jack called, said that he wanted someone awake here.' She shrugs. 'We're awake.'

Sparks fly out of the far wall, and Lisa snorts. 'It's been doing that all day. Bullets in the wiring.' She doesn't ask, and he doesn't volunteer how it happened.

Myfanwy pokes her head out of her hole to survey the area, and it occurs to him that he hasn't fed her. His hands jerk on the tabletop, because he wants to stand, but he can't bring himself to.

Rhys follows his stare up to the makeshift aerie. 'I fed the girl.' He lifts a hand, and it is bandaged. 'Next time I need some of those Harry Potter gloves.'

Lisa laughs. 'Next time you need to use that sauce like Jack told you to, and not try to hand-feed her.' Her fingers card her hair and she shifts in her chair. Ianto knows that if she's in it too long she gets restless. He can see that she's packed her facility tools in a bag on the side of her chair, so obviously she's planning on staying for a while. He feels badly, because the Hub isn't made for the disabled. She had probably taken the lift down and let Rhys and Jack lever her chair. Now she's restrained to one level. There aren't even any toilets within three flights of stairs.

He accepts the thermos of coffee Lisa hands him –the coffee machine had taken a bullet ricocheted from Hart's gun spree, and for that alone he will severely hurt him if and when he ever sees the man again—and pours it right into the thermos cap. Lisa 's face is patient, waiting for him to caffeinate himself. Rhys opens another can and examines the blueprints to the Hub, flat out on the table between them. Lisa looks away from Ianto and points to something on the plans, picking up her conversation with Rhys where they left off, something about rerouting lines and the like to put in a ramp. It doesn't even occur to Ianto to ask. He just sits there and watches the two of them take over Torchwood.

Jack and Gwen come back, Lisa and Rhys leave, Ianto energizes and it's back to weevil catching and cleanup. Jack stares at the walls a lot. Gwen cries, and they all go home in the same vehicle. Gwen and Rhys cuddle up on the sofa and watch bad telly, Jack hides out on the upper roof, and Ianto and Lisa lie on the master bed and talk about how they want to paint the walls a soothing colour, like blue.

Someone (read: Owen) had defaced the 'penthouse' label in the lift so that it says, "LOVE SHACK". Ianto doesn't even notice it until three weeks after he is dead. They are coming back from a mission and his eyes drift over to it. He knows that he is surprised because he can feel his brows knit for a second as he reads it.

'This is why our condo fee is so high,' he says to Jack. But he doesn't rub it off.

*~*~*~*~*~*

RHYS

He certainly hadn't picked the arrangements, such as they are, and he has a hell of a time explaining it to anyone who asks, Daffyd or Banana, but he doesn't quite have much to say when he explains it. It's unconventional, sure, but Rhys has seen aliens and weevils and has incinerated an alien baby from his wife while it was still in her, so he's become less and less concerned with conventional.

He is, however, concerned with the fact that everyone else has become outsiders. Almost as if Torchwood has relocated from below the Plass to this lush three bedroom penthouse. He thinks to make a funny sign out of the hexagonal Ts and hang it on the front door for a lark, but these days Jack isn't as amused by that shite as he used to be.

Rhys can't blame him. Tosh and Owen are dead, and Rhys might wonder if he and Gwen had taken their places in the penthouse but for the fact that when he had joked about it, Ianto had turned his face to the sink and said something about Tosh and Owen being their own selves; as far as Rhys had known, Tosh and Owen hadn't been dating, but hey, he isn't a member of Team Cardiff Torchwood, so perhaps he's got it wrong.

The night it happens, Rhys feels it in the air, like charged ozone. Gwen and Ianto and Lisa are sitting out in the garden, drinking piss ale, and Lisa is chain smoking and Ianto is bothering her about it. Then Jack comes back from UNIT and throws his coat over the chair in that "Daddy's home!" way of his; Lisa tosses her cigarette off the balcony. Gwen and Ianto make their innocent faces, and Rhys, who had been watching telly and had seen all of it, is relegated to the bleachers for a few minutes while Gwen and Ianto play patsy for Lisa. Jack, of course, is having none of it.

There is temporising, and someone sprays them all with beer, and when Rhys slides the glass door back to ask them all what they want for dinner, he finds himself suddenly doused, and Gwen is laughing and laughing and laughing, wild and crazy like she used to do when they were back at Uni on the grass and in love. Back before Torchwood. Back before Jack had pulled the scales from her eyes. From both their eyes, actually.

Rhys is smart enough to know that seeing isn't always wise.

She kisses him there, in front of them all, and that isn't new, but when she's done and Rhys looks over her shoulder, Lisa's eyes are afire with something, and Jack is smirking, and Ianto has hidden his face behind a wide palm, though Rhys can see the corner of his mouth upturned. Jack claps and tells them all how lively and drenched and bad they smell, and that there had been a reason that Ianto and Lisa had purchased this monstrosity of a place, and that reason was the hot tub.

Five hours. Five hours, three bottles of red wine and a mountain of sweet and sour chicken later, and Rhys hasn't come to.

The most cliched place in the world for an orgy, like every porno Rhys has ever seen, and there he is, screwing his wife into the side of the hot tub wall. Someone else, he hasn't even checked, is working himself in him from behind, and Rhys doesn't want to think too hard about this, so he pretends that it just feels good. It does, and he's not new entirely to this game, yeah, a few drunk parties at Uni. Gwen's eyes are open and they keep moving from him to the man behind him, the man who rides him like his hips are liquid, whose hands on his chest and stomach are long and tapered and tangle in his chest hair, carding it with affection even as Rhys comes, and then Gwen comes and this man, who he never quite sees, comes wordlessly, wet hair brushing Rhys's ears.

Rhys kisses Gwen's mouth, bites her ear, laps at her breasts because he doesn't want to turn around and find the person who's just had him. Now that it's over, the blanket of sobriety is wet and cold, and he isn't sure how this might change anything. Gwen's eyes are wide and she is smiling, smiling at him, and the man who has moved away, so that now Rhys can only guess as to whether it had been Jack or Ianto.

Lisa gasps behind him, and he turns then, because he wants to see, and there she is, in Ianto's arms, her thin arms tossed around his waist as he hefts her so that he can take one of her breasts in his mouth. The water must make lifting her easier, Rhys thinks when he glances under the surface to see her legs. Ianto has hooked one of them over the crook of an elbow, and after a second he abandons her chest to claim her mouth, lowering her a little to make it easier.

Gwen reaches under the water and fingers Rhys's hole and he flinches until she twists a finger in and bites his shoulder. He's sore, but it's good sore, and easy to forget about in the hot water and swim of his head. Rhys forgets about who else is with them, or rather, it occurs to him that he simply doesn't care. Jack saved his wedding, his wife. Lisa is his Torchwood Widow Clubmate, and Ianto keeps them all happy, keeps them all together. And he and Gwen are here now, too, aren't they? In this merry band of hot tub dwellers with scars and aches and a few too many drinks in their systems.

Ianto lifts Lisa and pushes inside her, and while she hangs onto the sides of the tub with her hands, Ianto presses his forehead to hers and does _things_ with his hands, touching and not touching, scraping and teasing, and all but fucking her eyes, he is. Rhys understands when he glances over at Jack, sees the look on his face, that this is something they have discovered in each other, something new, something flowering, something that Jack has given them.

He wonders, fleetingly, what Jack would give to him and Gwen, if he could.

Gwen ceases her teasing finger routine, and her arms go about his shoulders, so they sit back to watch what is essentially live porno. Rhys feels as if it should be more sordid, that if he was reading this story in Penthouse letters he'd feel dirty, but it's hard to see it as anything but heart pounding, terrifyingly amorous when Lisa calls Ianto's name and slaps the surface of the water, and Jack moves to support Ianto when he comes inside her, arching back and almost falling. Rhys studies Jack's fingers with suspicion.

When they are done, when Ianto slides from her and lathes her neck with his tongue like some big cat before turning to do the same to a patient Jack, Rhys wonders if he should applaud.

'Well, that's,' is what he manages to say when their eyes turn to him and Gwen.

'Now we all switch,' Jack says, grinning. When Ianto hits his shoulder, he raises his hands. 'Musical chairs?'

Lisa leans back heavily on her arms and waves her hand, nodding her head. 'I'm going to need a breather, gents,' she moans. 'Someone come hold me up.'

Rhys goes to Lisa with her luscious breasts and open arms, and Gwen settles in the curve of Ianto's bear-hug embrace. Jack seems to float almost, moving among them and against them, and sometimes away from them all, some host or faerie or god, something poetic, Rhys thinks, something Greek and sinful, yeah, like he'd learnt in grade school.

The water is scalding hot, actually, and in the cool evening, it's welcome. Rhys tilts his head back and stares at the stars in front of his vision. They are so high up, displaced, stabbing the sky, up here in this posh place, a far cry from his and Gwen's flat, or the houses that they occasionally look at in their spare time.

They haven't looked at one in the last week. It feels increasingly less and less urgent.

Ianto kicks his knee as he shifts and Rhys's eyes meet Gwen's. Her hand is buried in Ianto's chest hair, and she smiles at him, just for Rhys, in this tub full of people, with Jack on her other side, and Lisa's beautiful arms about Rhys's neck, her smile is full of everything that she told him when she'd slipped the gold band on his finger. All they've added is another layer.

'Well,' he says as Lisa lays her head on his shoulder, and Jack flips the switch on the jets, mumbling something about 'dialing to eleven'. The water almost erupts and Ianto curses, moving away and to Lisa's other side

Jack smiles and runs his hands through Gwen's hair, and Rhys doesn't feel one stab of jealousy. Because there, in Jack Harness's arms, Gwen's eyes stare at him, Rhys Williams, and they hold all the promise of their future. Strange, that.

'Well,' he tries again, not minding that Ianto's arm crosses over his behind Lisa, 'that's all sorted, then.'

*~*~*~*~*~*

JACK

Ianto cheats shamelessly at cards. Gwen can tell most of the time and she opts out when he raises his bid. But Rhys falls for it every time, and at this point he probably owes Ianto something like five rubbish trips or fifteen plates of spag bol, hell maybe three hand jobs, Jack doesn't know and he doesn't ask what their arrangement is.

The card games have gotten heated, especially on the nights when they all have a chance to tumble in from the Hub at around the same time, and for several hours at least, they can lounge around. Gwen and Ianto usually declare their independence from Torchwood by drinking something fortifying, and if they do get called back in, which feels more and more rare these days now that they have Ravi and Karen and that very draconian woman who Jack thinks he might have to fire working at the tourist office, they make themselves useless on purpose.

'Oh now,' Gwen says when Ianto lays down his hand, 'there is no way you got that hand on the first draw.' She tilts her chair back on two legs and sips from a glass of Pimm's the size of her head.

Ianto smirks and shuffles the deck with a bridge arch. 'I'm sorry you're shite, Gwen.'

Gwen thuds forward on her chair. 'You're looking for trouble,' she says.

Ianto raps the edge of the deck off the tabletop and smiles, reaching across to pull the rest of the IOU slips towards himself. 'How many is that?'

Gwen looks at Rhys. 'It's not solid, mate,' she tells Ianto.

Jack and Lisa glance at each other. Apparently Gwen and Ianto have some sort of currency exchange that they don't understand. Maybe it's a Welsh thing, because Rhys folds his hands behind his neck and sighs. 'Oh no, don't look at me. You agreed to it.'

Ianto pulls five slips of paper from his stack and holds them out to her, waving them like a fan. 'Five blow jobs equals one masterful fuck,' he says, and Gwen rolls her eyes. 'I'll trade you to Jack.'

Jack can feel his brain hitting the inside of his skull as it jerks from Lisa to Ianto to Rhys and Gwen. What? 'Excuse me?'

Gwen grabs all the slips and jumps from her chair. 'Sold.'

She runs from the room, Ianto chasing her and calling out, 'I was joking!'

Rhys shakes his head and glances at Jack over his pint glass. 'Sometimes I think they're distantly related.'

Jack is still processing the fact that Gwen might have just been traded to the majors for the evening. Three minutes later, Ianto returns to the room, face smeared with red lipstick, hair mussed. 'What?' Jack asks, 'kind of card game are you people playing here? I thought this was poker.'

Ianto's shirt is on backwards. 'Five card stud,' he deadpans and sits back in his chair. 'Gwen is tied up at the moment. Jack, want to sit in?'

Jack does.

From the bedroom they hear Gwen shout, 'I'm done now! Really! Ianto! Rhys!'

Rhys stands. 'I'll be back,' he tells them in a bad Austrian accent. As he leaves, Jack watches his arse. It's a nice arse.

Ianto catches his eyes. 'I love poker,' he says with a smile.

Jack does too. By the end of the first three hands, Lisa and Jack owe Ianto everything. Jack might even have bartered his wrist strap and a trip in the TARDIS.

Lisa laughs and buys them shirts for when they play—Team Jack, Team Gwen, Team Rhys, Team Ianto, Team Lisa, in black block letters across the front. Rhys grumbles and tugs his on, and then later Gwen draws a red heart on the back of it in magic marker while he sleeps on the sofa after the game. Ianto and Lisa switch often, wearing their own names, and for the past week, Gwen has been wearing Team Jack as a sleeping shirt.

Jack doesn't quite understand just how confused and tangled they are until he's sitting at the dining room table one morning and Rhys and Ianto stumble out of the spare room together, Gwen behind them, in nothing but Team Ianto. Later in the week, after the laundry is done, Lisa wheels out of the bedroom, clad in nothing but the Team Rhys shirt, and waggles her eyebrows at Jack.

This kind of living isn't lost on him, and part of it makes his heart ache, because it cannot last. His childhood home had been a haunt of couples and individuals moving in and out, sometimes staying for years, and when his dad and Gray had—well, he and his mother had been the movers then, actually, and Jack had had a succession of "sisters" and "brothers". He had never thought to ask his mother about the movement of it, because it hadn't seemed strange, like it does now. After over a century of twentieth century mores and trends, something had been bound to stick. Maybe if he had asked his mother about it, she might have sighed, like Ianto had yesterday, and said something about how Jack was being daft and that sometimes things just felt right, and that the outside world could go bugger itself.

His mum probably would have left out the bugger part.

*~*~*~*~*~*

IANTO

The flat is very large, Ianto knows, and it is possible to avoid everyone easily, but it's hard to avoid the noise. Ravi and Rhys are playing some game at the table with Lisa, and Gwen is on duty with Karen, investigating the synchronised talking child thing. Jack—who knows where Jack is. Ianto stands in the centre of the flat and realises that he hasn't actually read a book, a real honest-to-God book in a year.

He peruses the small shelves in their bedroom, and then the ones in the Lisa's office, and then the ones in the lounge. A lot of their books are the standard issue Uni ones that they had bought for classes and then never resold. Lisa had finished Uni, and so a lot more of the books are hers than his, things like _Cousine Bette_ and _Effective C++_ and _Steal this Book_. Ianto never finished Uni. It had seemed like a waste at the time, and he had been going through a phase, and then he'd got caught up in Torchwood, and well, there just never seemed to be time or reason.

He stares at the shelves, eyes off centre, listening to Lisa tell Ravi that he _has_ to give her money because she has three hotels or something. Ravi says something about capitalism, and Lisa shoves away from the table, laughing. She wheels past Ianto, stopping to place a hand in one of his trouser pockets.

'Reading?' she asks.

'Looking.'

She examines the shelves, then pulls a slim volume from a waist high shelf, handing it to him. 'Have at it. See me after the shower scene.' Ianto is fairly sure there is no shower scene in _Tom Jones_ , so she's making a _Dressed To Kill_ joke again.

Ianto watches her roll into the kitchen and glances about. The house is too full.

Late in the night, Jack finds him in the drained and cleaned hot tub, reading by a small booklight. He leans against the edge of the tub and bends down, putting his chin on his arms.

'It's cold.'

'I am wearing a coat.'

'It's dark.'

Ianto waves the book with the light attached to it.

'The hot tub is _empty_.'

'Which explains my inexplicable dryness.'

Jack stands, swings a leg over, and climbs in with him. He props his feet up on the far edge. 'Okay, not comfortable, but it has some sort of cradling, nurturing thing going, I can respect that.' Jack shoves his hands in his coat pockets and pulls out a pair of gloves with the tips cut off. 'I'd offer a blow job, but I think your dick would freeze.'

Ianto closes his book, but he sets it on the edge of the tub with the booklight still on. It's only September,' he tells Jack, but that is pointless. Jack gets cold. He likes to joke that he was genetically bred for heat, but Ianto wonders if it's a joke.

'So, what are we doing out here?' Jack asks. 'I mean, I'm out here because of _you_ , but that doesn't explain you being out here, hiding in your tub fort, reading classic lit.'

Ianto sighs and wishes that he had a drink. Water maybe, or something hot to curl his hands around. He doesn't actually want to drink anything, really. He just wants something to do with his hands. 'There were too many people in the house,' he says, and now it sounds ridiculous.

'Wishing you were back to the old days?' Jack asks. 'Do you want me to go?'

God, that's loaded with buckshot and bullshite. Ianto stretches, bending at the waist to touch his toes. 'Not precisely. Just wish it was, hrm.' He doesn't have an answer.

Jack clucks his tongue. 'You and Lisa should have a kid. That'd clear us all out.' It comes out of nowhere and Ianto turns his head to look at Jack, who is wiggling his fingers in the gloves. 'These always cut off your circulation, why is that? It's not like they didn't fit when the fingers were on.'

'I'm sorry, what?'

Jack waves his fingers. 'They cut off—'

'Yeah, I heard that part. The other part, please.'

'Oh, the kid part? Yeah,' Jack replies, settling down and stilling his body as much as he seems capable of most days. 'I hear all the cool people are doing it these days. It's what people do when they have the time and…I dunno, it was just a suggestion.' He snorts. 'Rhys has baby fever.'

Ianto crosses his arms. He doesn't want to have this conversation. And yet. He looks at his trainers, the rubber on the bottoms causing his feet to cling to the tub wall. 'Then maybe Rhys and Gwen should be having this conversation,' he mumbles. He doesn't even want to consider the physical logistics of Lisa's condition being compounded by…well.

The heater kicks on, and the vent up on the roof rumbles to life.

Jack waves his hands. 'I had a kid once. Well, a few. Kids are fun. You know,' he winks, 'when they're not yours, I guess. Your sister has kids, right?'

Ianto slams his head back into the wall of the tub, but it just makes a hollow noise and it doesn't hurt. If he can wound himself, then he can drive himself to A&E. Or he could just leave the hot tub, even though he realises with some petulance that he was here first.

'When a television show is failing, they try to bring in a kid,' Ianto says. 'It's usually the kiss of death.'

Jack rolls his eyes. 'Good thing we're not on the telly, then. We'd be X-rated anyway. Made for HBO. Showtime.' He says that last one with a little bit of jazz hands.

Ianto sighs. 'A kid would not solve our problems.'

Jack winks and ignores him. 'What if we were a sexy show about polyamory? We could corner the market on that.' He does a little soft-shoe routine on the tub wall.

'Then a kid will very much _not_ solve our problems.'

'And our problems,' Jack says solemnly, not looking at him, 'they are legion.'

Ianto wants to argue, he really does, but he agrees with Jack, Jack who is humouring him in a lot of ways. It's easy, Ianto thinks, to be the one who can leave, to be the third who just, well, isn't legally bound, who has left before, who's just along for the ride.

Jack stretches and toes off his shoes, even though he grumbles that it's obscenely _cold_ outside. His socks are white. Ianto remembers reading that good guys always wear white socks. Ianto's white tube socks are dingy because he washes them with his dark dress socks.

Ianto looks up at the stars and wonders if anyone is looking right back at him. Once he and Rhi had tried to dig a hole in the back of the house, as deep as they could get it, and the whole time Ianto had imagined that some child on the other side of the planet was digging a hole as well. Just thinking of meeting in the middle of the earth, chests puffed out with pride and accomplishment for _going all the way through_ had made his heart thump in his chest, wild and sonorous.

Then they had hit a water pipe and Tad had beat both of their bums black and blue.

Still, as he stares at the stars, he thinks, _Someone is looking right at my face from trillions of miles away. This way, we are always face to face, even when we aren't._

'I love you, Jack,' he says. Jack doesn't reply, just continues his foot tapping, and Ianto senses that Jack is waiting for more before the moment is acceptably impactful. 'I love Lisa, and I love you.' He waves a hand in a 'voila' gesture. 'There.'

'Was that so hard?'

'I've told you before.'

'February twenty-ninth, no joke,' Jack says, lowering his feet to the floor of the hot tub and reaching over to turn out the booklight, as if that one synthetic pinpoint bothers him in a sea full of natural ones. 'I was beginning to think you only said it on leap years.'

Ianto wonders if they are going to quarrel. It's funny watching it unfold as it happens. Most of the time he is so caught up in the actual issues of the argument itself that he doesn't even know he's in the middle of one until it's too late. But right now, maybe the cold is making them sluggish, their dialogue is viscous; it reminds him of the name of the martial art Lisa had learnt in London, "trapping-hands Aikido".

He grabs for the hand nearest him with its fingerless gloves. 'If you love someone, you shouldn't _have_ to say it all the time. You should just live it, with every action.'

Jack considers this, looking at him, cocking his head and then turning to look out over the skyline. 'Lovely and poetic, but kinda lacking, unless you're in a novel.' With his free hand he ticks off his fingers, thinking. ' _Wuthering Heights_ , _Jane Eyre_ , _Sense and_ —hey wait—is this from _The Princess Bride_?'

Ianto can feel his face get warm. 'I might've had a thing for Princess Buttercup, okay?' he mumbles.

Jack almost cackles, throwing one arm around Ianto and pulling him in. 'Only you would draw romance lessons from the Dread Pirate Roberts,' he says. Ianto resists the cuddle, because that's what it is, presenting Jack with his back and shoulder instead, so Jack has to almost spoon him on the bench. 'Stop being difficult,' Jack whispers in his ear, and turns him around. He presses his lips to Ianto's temple, and Ianto can feel the heat in them, hear the sound of his breath through his nose. Hell, he can see his own breath. It really _is_ cold.

They sit there, in the dark, in the stillness. Out of the corner of his eyes Ianto sees the lights in the harbour, far far away, red and green warning signals for boats. He wishes that all buoys in life had little flashing warnings to let you know where they were.

'You know I wasn't pressuring you to have a kid,' Jack says, turning his hands over and staring at the backs of them through the gloves. 'I just don't want you to lose an opportunity, to…not do something you might want to do because I'm—'

Ianto can't listen to it anymore or it will just make him irate. He grabs the lapels of Jack's coat and yanks them in, lips meeting Jack's in the centre of their gravities, opening his mouth and tasting Jack's tongue, his heart nattering on and on about something important, most surely. He can feel Jack's scratchy gloves grasp his face, palms cupping his jaw, and it's good then, in the hot tub, hollow and dark, nothing above them but sky, trillions of beings watching them from trillions of miles away.

Jack undoes Ianto's trousers, laughing as he angles himself in front to pull the denims down. 'These jeans are scandalous,' he purrs, letting the vibration roll through his throat as he lays his vibrating Adam's apple on Ianto's hard cock. 'You make everything so hard, you know.'

Ianto fists Jack's hair and doesn't say anything, because that is impossible to deny. Everything with him is so hard, no, so difficult, Ianto knows. His tad used to say that, _Ianto, why do you have to be so difficult?_ , or his teachers, _Ianto is a difficult child_. Ianto thinks about why that is, but he doesn't want to care. He wants to just be, actually, and Jack makes that easy, even as he chides Ianto for a quasi-fault that he cannot diagnose or fix.

Jack swallows him down, and the chill air that he had complained about is nonexistent, just the coldness of the hot tub under Ianto's arse, but he can't even feel that. Jack's coat flares around him, hiding his body, his arms framing Ianto, hands reaching up for Ianto's shirt. Every time he pulls away from the base of Ianto's cock, the cold air rushes in, and Ianto gasps; it feels like being hit with a wet towel a little.

Jack's tongue is almost rough, cat-like, when he runs it around the tip of Ianto's cock, or mouths the shaft and takes everything in. He does that thing with the foreskin and his knuckles that he calls 'the Harkness special', and his other hand plays with Ianto's balls, fingers looking for the testicles to roll about, almost to the point of pain. His eyes roll up to watch Ianto, and when he smiles, the inner edges of his molars scrape a little.

The gulls that live in their upper roof launch themselves, and Ianto wonders why they're awake in the middle of the night. One of them dives for the tub and lands on the edge, blinking and squawking at them collapsed in the tub, Jack's mouth hot around his cock, Ianto's hands fluttering about his head like wings, mantling around Jack's ears. He blinks at the bird, which then hops down to land on Jack's back.

They freeze, and Ianto waves a hand then, making quiet 'shoo' noises, and he can feel Jack laughing around his cock, still sucking, his tongue pressing in the underside. Ianto smacks the bird with the flat of his hand and it just jumps backwards, further away from him and down Jack's back.

Jack pulls off his cock but uses both hands to grab it, perhaps shielding it from cold. 'Leave it,' he says, grin wide and eyebrows raised in amused disbelief. Ianto covers his face with both hands and pretends that he's not here. This is one of the many times in the past few years that he feels as if everyone is more amused than he is. But hands are replaced with an expert mouth and seconds later he forgets about the bird and the books and the kid and everything but the fact that he's coming into Jack's mouth, Jack's mouth that sucks in a steady pulse so strong that he can't be all human, no. By the time he's aware of his surroundings again, the bird is gone.

Jack tucks him back into his trousers, and they finally stretch out on the floor of the tub, giving up on the benches entirely. Ianto pulls his coat about him, but then Jack crawls up and half lays on him, half next to him, his coat covering them both. Ianto reaches out and presses his fingerpads into the wool, leaving a bit of him on it, skin flakes, microscopic cells, markings that he has made a difference on a subatomic level.

'That was bracing,' Ianto whispers, recalling a night that seems so very long ago now, it's a miracle that he even remembers it.

There's a chuckle against his chest. 'You were so shocked and confused,' Jack says, snorting into his neck. 'I thought you were going to fuck me on the floor in front of Myfanwy.'

Ianto rolls his eyes. 'Not in front of a giant flying bird,' he says. The thought is worse than the seagull. Myfanwy is family. He'd have to look her in the beady little eyes every day.

'I refuse to be cockblocked by a bird,' Jack says into his ear.

'Now we can say that for sure,' he replies, running a circle around the small of Jack's back. They chuckle halfheartedly and fall quiet.

'I'm sorry I don't say it,' he says into the silence. The hand on his neck tightens a little, and he suspects that Jack is checking for his pulse. He does that sometimes. It's a thing, and it is comforting. 'But it's true.'

'Don't be sorry, Ianto. Just,' Jack says to him hoarsely, 'It wouldn't kill you to say it more often, okay?'

Ianto smiles at the phantoms in the sky, so far far away. 'As you wish.'

They doze in the hot tub, what Jack calls the unsexiest use of a hot tub ever until Ianto reminds him of the time they let that visiting alien with all the fur use the industrial one at the Hub, and Jack relents, agreeing that _that_ , and the ensuing cleanup of fifteen tonnes of green fur from the traps, had been indeed the unsexiest use of a hot tub ever.

The explosion wakes them up, and they jolt, limbs flailing, feet ringing the walls of the tub like gongs. They can see the fire and the cloud roiling through the pre-dawn sky. Ianto's neck is stiff, and his cheek is cold with a patch of drool that he wipes away with his hand. Jack stumbles out of the tub towards the balcony edge.

Ianto understands what has happened almost immediately. Or rather, he doesn't understand it at all, except that the direction in which they are looking, on which their eyes are riveted, is the familiar slide of east, the oft pointed to direction of work. Jack's hands grip the railing, and Ianto stands next to him, squinting as if the smoke will clear for him, or he has somehow developed x-ray vision.

'What is it?'

Jack doesn't say anything, just stares at the orange in the horizon, his jaw grinding.

Lisa wheels out with the mobile and their Bluetooths in her lap. Her face is white. 'It's Gwen. The Hub is gone.'

*~*~*~*~*~*

JACK

When Gwen tells them that she is pregnant, Rhys and Lisa explode with delight. Lisa is off to the races, and Rhys is a rollercoaster of Welsh vowels and kisses on Gwen's face and hands and stomach.

Ianto and Jack catch each other's eyes over the din.

Because this is how it happens, really, what Jack has often come to call the natural order of the twenty-first century, because while it might have also happened in his time, he likes to blame the faulty workings of humans in this century on the time period and not the species, because he has high hopes that they will some day conform to his tastes. He's going to have to live with them forever, after all.

That's petulant and demanding, he is aware. And he takes his ungrateful self out to the balcony, where he can stand with his hands on the railing and listen to the tinkle of their glasses as they drink to Gwen's baby's health.

It couldn't have come at a better time, actually, what with the Hub in ruins and them sifting through the wreckage under the giant tarps that seem to draw larger crowds than when it had just been them digging about with wheelbarrows and shovels. But UNIT had brought the tarps at the Crown's request, and now that it is getting colder and the rain freezes sometimes on the site in the overnight, Jack is grateful for them.

Ravi is still reeling from the loss of Karen, who they'd brought in with him shortly before the Hub had exploded. He's a brilliant tech, but he's no Toshiko Sato. Jack shoves his hands in his pockets and encounters objects that he has salvaged from the Hub and cannot seem to let go of; they weigh down his pockets and probably make it look like he has three cocks. Normally, that is something that he'd find amusing enough to use it as a recurring gag about the house.

The loss of the Hub has rattled him, though he likes to pretend that it hasn't. He can live without the things, he tells himself. He was never a collector of debris, flotsam and jetsam, really. He likes to joke that you don't own anything that you can't carry at a dead run, but that's more a remnant of his older lives, lives spent on ships in the stars, where everything he'd owned could fit in a duffel, or later when all he really wanted to remember was what was in his kit, what he could carry from trench to trench crawling on his belly.

But there are things he would have liked to have held on to, simply because he's had them so long—a box of photographs and a few letters, a few special shell casings, some bullets that he'd dug out of people or things and tucked into his pocket, collecting them in a discarded cloth bag (A body, a live one, lies frozen in the bowels of the rubble, waiting to be discovered, Jack knows. He is slow going through where the morgue should be, because he isn't sure if he wants to be the one to deal with Gray's body, or if he wants to delegate it, shuffle it off, never see it again. If he doesn't see it, then it never happened, a falsehood that lies heavier than the wool about his shoulders.).

Jack watches the gulls dive off the railing to catch the updraft and sail, and he wonders what it's like to defy gravity without anything but the body one is born with. He'd once had a brief fling with a winged Tervali, and in their afterglow, while she was grooming her feathers (and him, oh yeah, that beak against his skin), he'd asked her what it was like to fly. She had sat back and asked him, 'Can you drink the sunlight? Can you eat a rainbow? It's those and not those.'

So, no, actually, he cannot imagine flying like that, but someday he decides he'll try it. He certainly has the time to explore the idea.

The loss of the Hub, however, does mean that his space is gone, and he doesn't like to think about that. It's not like he had slept there often, but that the option was there had been comforting. With Gwen and Rhys in the house, he doesn't have a bedroom of his own, and while that doesn't usually bother him (Lisa has offered to move her office into the living area, and he just couldn't do that to her), sometimes he wants to lie down in the quiet and just think. Ianto had bought ear plugs, actually, passed them out to everyone and made a statement about how when someone was wearing the earplugs that meant they were off limits. Jack hasn't used his, but he finds them adorable (And he never pays attention when anyone has them in, so he figures there's no point in his using them.).

Salvaging is hard work, Jack thinks as he rocks from one foot to another and sniffs the air. There's an acrid burnt smell and he realises that it's him. He'd been out on the fringes of the blast crater today, digging near where the tower had been. He'd changed his clothes and washed his hands, but he needs a good soak. The hot tub has been refilled. He glances at it and wonders if he mightn't use his earplugs for the first time.

The others haven't taken the loss of the Hub well either. Gwen associates the location, the space, with Owen and Toshiko, and just looking at it seems to cause her physical pain (though, he thinks, in retrospect, that might have just been the morning sickness).

Ianto doesn't say anything for hours at a time when he works, just trudges from bin to bin, plastic bag after plastic bag, sorting with what Jack has decided is the eagle eye of a Torchwood scholar. Ianto might doubt his own critical judgement skills when he stops to think about it, but in action he is never hesitant. He pulls things from Jack's hands and bins or saves them without the slightest doubt. Jack trusts him enough to never argue.

Ianto is bothered by the loss of knowledge. Yeah, he says, the servers are remote and they have the whole Torchwood system, but the documents, the files, the artefacts they used to have, they are gone or mangled or buried under the rubble. Jack is fairly sure that if he didn't monitor him, Ianto might go down there in the middle of the night and search in the dark with a torch.

Jack knows how it is. Ianto's too young to understand that knowledge can't be saved, just passed on for a while. They never quite have anything they can't carry at a dead run, whether talking about Jack or society as a whole.

And some things they just borrow from other times. When they had found one slender claw in the wreckage, chitin scorched and hardened to a point, rotting meat still clinging to one end, Ianto had burst into tears. Jack had cleaned it off and tucked it into a pocket. It's still there in his trousers, and he turns it over now with one hand, reminding himself of how this is the way of things. This is the way of Torchwood, not the maternity party in the other room.

Jack sighs. He would have liked to have saved his coral. He'd had plans for that.

The party noises get louder when the sliding glass door opens and someone slips out, closing it behind them so that everyone sounds so far away again. Ianto finds him at the far railing, and they look out over the city, dazzling and shiny and full of promise. It's as taunting right now as a newborn child, stretched out and drawing its breath to mewl

Ianto coughs a few times, hacking a little, and Jack worries. He's been at the site too long; too much dust and alien crap in the air. Jack is occasionally concerned that all that alien tech dust will get sucked into the clouds and come down on Newport in a rain shower, and all the school children will grow tentacles or something. Ianto just takes a few seconds to breathe—he can hear it not a foot away from him.

He lets Ianto wrap around him from behind, and then his lips ghost against Jack's ear.

'It's not over, you know,' Ianto says, 'Not by a long shot.'

*~*~*~*~*~*

GWEN

Her belly is discomfortingly round, she thinks, as she rubs it and stands to get more tea.

Jack comes into the main building and jogs up to his office upstairs. Her gaze drifts to the door when it shuts. This new Hub. She'll never get used to it. Sure, the last one had been underground, and dirty and dim and had had dinosaur shite everywhere, but it had been their little maverick place.

The new place is still shiny. It's lost the new building smell, but that had been inevitable, especially with the things they bring in. And it has windows, which never cease to amaze her. Gwen had never seen Torchwood One, but Ianto has told her that the windows had been the one thing he'd missed.

And it isn't as if they'd had any choice; the Crown had been most conciliatory when they'd discovered that the Hub had been, well, demolished by the Home Office during the 456 affair, and they had lavished funds on the restructuring of a new location, this time farther from the Bay, but still close enough that Gwen can see gulls winging their way past her window (window!).

She does like the layout though, very much like the old Hub, with a main floor and three upper levels that circle it. It is circular still, like the old Hub, with spokes that jut out like spider legs. The security is just as complicated, though to the outside world the Hub looks like a large industrial complex. They need retinal scans to get in, along with a few keycards. Jack suggests that they get implants so they don't have to carry the sensors on them, but Ianto nixes it with a reminder about how Jack would lose his if he exploded or lost a body part. Leave it to Ianto to use the overly macabre to illustrate his point.

She rounds the huge tech area that they had constructed based on plans that Tosh had drawn up, part of her "rainy day projects" folder. Jack had found them when sifting through the Mainframe for ideas on how to build from under the ground up, and Ianto had said something about how a rainy day projects folder was rather like a joke in Cardiff. Then Ravi had looked at their plans, since they thought the current Tech should at least have a say, and he had waved his hands and said, not for the first time, that if Toshiko Sato were still alive he would put a ring on her finger and take her home to meet his mother.

Gwen doubts that, but then again, she has a hard time seeing Tosh with anyone anymore, since her futures have run out. Jack had told Ravi that Tosh would have eaten him alive, to which Ianto had hastily and needlessly added, 'Not literally.'

But Ravi is a clever albeit clumsy and somewhat cocksure lad, and she loves him a bit for that. He had been devastated by Karen's death, like they all had been to some degree, but Ravi especially because they had started Torchwood at the same time, been each other's Secret Keepers as it were.

She reaches the large kitchenette with its cheery yellow border that Ianto had grumbled over but allowed, and bypasses the coffee machine with regret. Ianto has left the kettle on for her, warming the water, and when she pours it, her eyes catch the little basket of biscuit packets and specialty teabags he has selected just for her, decorating the basket with a small sign: 'Gwen's. Touch & Despair.'

Ianto thinks of everything. She notices that the basket is suspiciously picked over and glances at Jack's office, two flights up. His light is on, even in the daytime (no windows for Jack's office, please). And she is missing all of her Jaffa Cakes.

That's a good enough excuse to go up there, though Gwen tells herself firmly that she doesn't need an excuse to visit Jack in his office, ever. She abandons her mug and waves to Melissa in the new medical bay as she mounts the stairs, one hand under her belly. Just putting it under there and lifting makes her feel better. It's not as if she thinks the kid will just fall out, and she can't move her stomach out of the way, but she isn't immune to impractical gestures. She wonders if she'll become one of those mothers who slings an ineffectual arm across her child in the front seat when they have to hard stop in traffic.

Jack is at the window of his office, surveying the Hub just like he used to do. His eyes slide over her, as if he doesn't want to see her, like she is clothed in a perception filter, but she knows that he does. His hands are in his pockets and he watches Ravi do something inadvisable with a bit of tech that they'd brought in earlier. Gwen is sure that it is a gun, but Ravi thinks it's a communication device. She just hopes that it doesn't "communicate" through his skull.

Ianto steps into her line of vision below, and she sees him manhandle the tech from Ravi, point it at an empty coffee mug, and quick as you please, the mug explodes into fragments. Jack barks a laugh and turns from the window, retreating into the recesses of his office, his Batcave, where he keeps the lights dim and incandescent, a throwback to something, perhaps; maybe he wants to scare Melissa, the new recruit.

She doesn't knock on the frame of his door, just saunters in and sits with a grunt in the padded chair in front of his desk. Jack is cradling his coral in his hands, peering at it, as if there's something in it that he wants to move. Maybe he's trying to will it to grow faster.

Gwen doesn't know what the coral is to him, but she does know that when they had found it in the rubble, intact, almost black, broken around the edges—she had almost missed it—Jack had crushed it to his chest and left the site, walking down the ruined Plass in the rain, both hands cradling it. When she and Ianto had got home that night he had been soaking it in the bathtub for hours, sitting on the floor and reading Agatha Christie's Death On the Nile to it until his voice was hoarse. Ianto had brought him tea and then closed the door on the two of them, only emerging later with a suspiciously damp shoulder.

Gwen thinks that the coral has something to do with the Doctor, but she doesn't ask, because there are things that she knows she will never get a straight answer on, especially when they involve the Doctor. Two years ago she might have pressed the issue. Now, it's just another missing piece that isn't necessary to know, and Gwen likes to think that she has a better instinct for that now.

Her eyes light on the Jaffa Cake wrapper on his desk. Hah.

'Gwen, looking good,' Jack says, glancing up. 'Living la—'

'If you say "large", so help me God,' she tells him. Jack thinks her pregnancy is hysterically funny sometimes. He likes to talk to the kid in her stomach, tell it things like, "When you turn five, I'm going to take you to the circus and show you alllllllllll the acrobats", and "When you get older, your parents will try to feed you laverbread. Don't. Just don't."

Jack blows gently on the coral, distracted, mock-distracted, they're both the same. 'I was going to say "lasciviously",' he counters. Then he winks. Mock-distracted, then.

'I start leave on Friday,' she says, as if he doesn't know. He's been joking about it all week, something about how now they can stop ordering so much takeaway.

She knows why he's doing it, but it's getting old. She and Rhys had moved into the house two months ago, and she's ready for it to be over with. Now is as good a time as any. She gives up on any hope of crossing her legs and instead thinks about putting her feet up on Jack's desk.

'Let's have a chat,' she says, 'like in the old days.'

Jack grins, but it's one of his patented I'll-be-disarmingly-cheerful-to-avoid-issues faces. 'What shall we chat about? Pushchairs? Nappies? Do your tits hurt?'

'You're an ass.'

Jack shrugs. 'Fine then. Guns? Weevils? That flaying monster last month that almost gave you a Caesarian right here in the Hub?' He sets the coral back into the stand. 'That was good times.'

Gwen shrugs. 'The cells are temperamental. That was a mistake.' And it's true, the new cell locks are mechanised and computer locked, with a deadlock seal, but they keep opening at bad times when people clap their hands. Ravi swears up and down that he didn't do it, but they suspect that he might have mixed in a sensor for Jack's old "Clapper" lighting system in there somewhere. They just have to find the right circuit.

Jack smiles, but it's wan, strained. 'Fine.'

'You can't treat me this way forever,' she says, lightly, because with Jack it is best to use a light touch, a trick she has learnt from Ianto. When he frowns, she knows he recognises the technique and is going to fight being "handled". That's fine; she has techniques for that, as well. After all, she's worked and lived with the man. She knows how this goes.

'I don't treat you any way, Gwen,' he says. His hands toy with the edges of an old book.

'Hmn,' she says. Her hand comes to rest on her stomach and his eyes follow it. As if on cue, something falls downstairs with a metallic clang and they both whip their heads around to the glass wall of Jack's new office.

'HE STARTED IT!' comes the shout from below, Ravi it sounds like. Ianto would never shout, well, not that.

Jack puts his head on his desk then. 'I have to go Weevil hunting with him later,' he groans. Ravi is like a ferret, which is why almost a year after his recruitment, he still has yet to clear firearms training. Owen at his worst had been a better marksman without his contacts in.

'Melissa calls you Batman,' Gwen says lightheartedly, because it feels as if something has shifted, and not just in her belly. She rubs her palm on the spot where a foot is pressing out, because if she isn't fast enough she misses it, and she senses that these little moments are the ones she'll want to remember vividly, oh—until that foot jostles her lung.

His eyes track her hand, face a mask of something, but he must feel the shift also, because the smile he offers is genuine. He could never stay angry with her; it's a gift. 'Encourage that. Someone on this team has to respect me.' He shrugs. 'Or at least think I hang out on rooftops and fight crime. Without the tights.' He waves a hand towards the lower levels. 'Ianto gets to wear the tights.'

'Well, he does have the bum for them,' she replies without thinking, and Jack's face darkens again. 'It was never meant to be permanent,' she says suddenly, and this is the crux of it, really. 'You know that, right?'

Time stretches out. That phantom grandfather clock that used to tick in the Hub, the one they'd never found, has followed them here, and they'd spent a few hours scanning for it before just deciding not to question it. It ticks now, for them, counting the seconds, the minutes in which they watch each other. Because he's not staring, and he's not glaring. He's thoughtful. Gwen just waits, because he has to process what all this means to him, and she has to wait for it to come out before she can respond.

These things, Lisa had said one day at lunch, these things are worth it, the waiting, because Jack comes to conclusions fairly when given enough time to simply be, to exist himself into the decision, the right thing to do. It is a shame, really, that most of Jack's decisions must be made on the fly, because if he had all the time in the world, he could always make the right choice.

Good thing he does have all the time in the world. Too bad the rest of reality doesn't.

'I bet on the day you were born, your dad took one look at those big eyes of yours and knew that he was a goner,' Jack says, sighing and leaning conspiratorially over the desk.

Gwen stands then, because she hurts, and she will be happy when the sprog gets his eviction notice and decides to clear out, though she's not precisely looking forward to that part. Rhys is trying to prepare her, with the Lamaze and the occasional book, but just the word episiotomy is enough to make her want to clench her muscles and ask Jack if they don't have some alien tech that can just…transport the baby into the cot.

'I have my moments,' she says. That's all there is then. She wants to put all this to rest, to fold it into their relationship and smooth it over, like evening out the frosting on a cake. She and Rhys had talked about it the other night, about what they had been doing at the penthouse in the first place, what they had taken from it. Rhys had told her that he'd never fancied himself a swinger, but that it had been good, yeah, while it had lasted. She'd had to agree.

If there is anyone in the world who she could have lived with in such a manner, it had been those three. She is fairly sure that even if she and Rhys moved right back in, the dynamics would be different. In retrospect, it had been a perfect conflux of events, all cascading and collapsing in on themselves until the five of them had been impacted, imploded into the centre of this living, loving arrangement. She wants to tell this to Jack, but it sounds as if she is trying too hard to defend it, as if the nine months they had spent together had been something bad. She is sure that she wouldn't have made it out the other side of the rollercoaster without them.

The nine-month timing is not something that she can symbolically ignore either.

'So now that you're out of here for a while, I suppose I've lost my chance to tempt you into trying out those stirrups in the med bay?' He waggles his eyebrows. 'They have faux fur padding.'

'Careful, Harkness, I'm very pregnant,' she laughs. 'Well past the sex window.'

Jack grins when she rounds the desk, turning his chair so that he can hug her sitting down. 'There are so many things you can do that don't require displacing the little person in there,' he says, and then he wraps his arms about her, a much more Herculean task than previously.

'I don't think so,' she whispers. 'Pretty thought, though.'

Jack presses his cheek to her stomach. 'Pregnant women are hot.'

'Everyone is hot.'

'Well, yeah. Sort of. Not Margaret Thatcher—well…'

She smacks his shoulder. Everything is sorted now. Everything is golden. She can go home to her lovely house and lovely husband and take a lovely bath. In less than a month they will have a lovely child, and if that is sentimental and cloying, then Jesus, sign her up.

'You be good,' she says to him, as he presses his lips to her belly. She wants to feel them through the material, but even Jack isn't that magical.

He smiles against the hardness, and then looks up at her. 'If not, I'll be better.'

*~*~*~*~*~*

JACK

Ravi brings him the chair personally, after hours, when he knows that Ianto is gone. He and Melissa had retrieved it out in Splott earlier in the day. Ravi had made some jokes over the comm about space wheelchairs and ha ha, wouldn't it be cracker if it just took off, or was a hover chair or something. Jack jokes and starts to tell Ravi that if he wants a hoverchair he can dig around in the Archives before he realises that they don't have Archives anymore. Well, not those ones.

But in a secure line, Ravi says, 'Jack, your name is on it.'

Jack smiles. 'My name is on a lot of things floating out there in the cosmos, Rav. In fact—'

'No Jack, _your name is on a wheelchair_ ,' Ravi says, as if that's supposed to make a diff—

Oh.

Jack sends everyone home and meets Ravi at the SUV, and there they stand in their long coats and if they weren't Torchwood he would make a joke about looking like members of some secret organisation, with their shiny black car and coats and earpieces. Ravi is a funny bloke, but he thinks Jack is cheesy (twentieth century for bad, thanks Mickey), one of the many reasons Jack keeps him. Ravi follows orders even when he doesn't agree with them, and Jesus, between Gwen and Ianto, it's refreshing to have _one_ good soldier in the bunch.

Even if the good soldier couldn't hit the broad side of a barn.

Ravi unloads the chair from the back of the SUV while he walks over. There's no worry, actually, the new Hub has a private secure car park for all their cars (After the Torsk had put sugar in Owen's gas tank Jack had really wished they'd had a secure car park.).

The car park reminds him of the Torchwood One facility they had used for a while after the Hub had exploded. It doesn't have a sofa, or trash barrels, but it is hollow and sterile and dusty all at the same time. It feels as antiquated as it isn't, and that makes him wonder if his insides aren't just the same, hollow and dated and built to look like old when they're new.

'I'm not an expert, but I got a feeling about this,' Ravi says as he fights with the brakes. Jack steadies the thing and gives it the once over, his breath fast, his heart doing that flippety-flip it does when the back of his brain has made a connection and is uploading it to the front of his skull. It just takes a minute to get there.

The chair looks just like the one he left that morning, the one cradling Lisa's frame as she griped about being late for work. There are a few scuffs, and if he looks at the back of it, a little burn/sticker/marking/thing that displays the New New York Sisters of Plenitude Hospital. Jack stands up straight and lays a hand on one of the push handles. He tells himself that the zing he feels upon making contact with it is just his imagination working overtime.

Ravi sighs. 'Yeah,' he says, as if he can tell what Jack is thinking, though he couldn't ever, not quite, or maybe Jack is that transparent. He has a hard time remembering that on Earth, this Earth, sometimes, he lucks into hiring people who can see right through him (Is 'unlucks' a word? That one.).

'Here, right here,' Ravi says, pointing and then dancing back in a nervous gesture, like turning the shower on and then stepping out of the way for that first split second of cold water in the pipes. Jack turns the chair to see what he has pointed at.

Carved onto the left armrest is a message: "Jack, we love you. All times. I&L."

Jack calls them at home. Ianto answers, puzzled, and Jack knows that he has to play the conversation light, fast and loose, or Ianto will pick up the scent of worry like a bloodhound and he'll have to prevaricate. It's easier and harder to lie on the phone really, easier because he doesn't have to worry about his face, but harder, because Ianto is listening for his facial expressions, so he has to worry about his face.

'Are you sure you're quite all right?' Ianto asks. In the background, Jack can hear Lisa screaming something to the effect of, 'The flambé is on fire!' and he knows they have tried to make that whiskey thing without him, which is just as well. At least it means that Ianto will be distracted.

'Yeah, yeah,' he says absently, looking at the curve of what is unmistakably Ianto's 'J' in his name scrolled across the chair arm. Ravi stuffs his hands in his pockets and pretends that he's not standing there. 'I just wanted to see if you were okay.' He hits his forehead and Ravi makes a "What the fuck?" face at him. Jack never asks those kinds of questions. Jack kicks the chair in front of him and watches it roll across the floor a few feet.

Ianto is _quite distracted_ , is what he is, because he sighs. 'I think I'm catching something,' he replies. 'I can't wait up for you.'

Jack snorts then, and turns away from Ravi to round the car. He usually doesn't care if anyone overhears his sex talk, but this domestic stuff is a touchier subject, and Ravi should still feel free to think of him as the Intergalactic Gigolo; that lasts for a split second as he remembers that Ravi had watched him feed Gwen and Lisa sticky toffee pudding with his fingers three weeks ago at Rhys's birthday party. Hrm.

'Go to bed. Drink fluids. Take some of that psychosomatic over the counter stuff that was developed by a teacher blasted into space by NASA,' he says jovially. 'I know you like that fake stuff.'

It is Ianto's turn to snort. 'When you treat them as if they're real and they work, they might as well be real,' he says then. 'Wait, wait, hold on—'

There is that jostling phone noise and Lisa whispers into his ear. 'Ianto looks like death warmed over. Did you unearth something?'

Jack knows what she's asking. As nonchalant as she pretends to be, Lisa lives in fear of alien viruses, has ever since Thames House. Jack cannot blame her. It had been his fault that they hadn't the foresight to bring gas masks, and it had only been through a little bit of quick-witted wet towelery and the like that they had managed to get Ianto out of there, though he had been in an intensive care unit for a week. Ever since then, Lisa dreads metal canisters and phantom sniffles.

And they seem to come, and not in single spies, but in battalions: the sniffles, the coughs, the fevers, negligible at first, the Cardiff winter, Ianto says. And then deepening, settling like clockwork, as if whatever Ianto had sucked in had bypassed his coal-mining hard-knock genetics and grafted itself to his lungs. Karen might have been able to help him, but…and Melissa is too new, Jack doesn't know if he's keeping her yet.

Jack keeps telling himself that if he doesn't call Martha for help, then it might just go away. Yeah _that_ tactic has always served him well, he thinks as he looks at the walls of the new car park, still pastel blue and spatter-free.

'He's fine. Nothing that I can see.' Of course it's not always the things they can see, but that is not something he wants to mention this time, no matter how apropos.

Lisa sighs into the phone, then she mentions a few things that she would like to do to his anatomy that are promising, and then she hangs up, the smoke alarm going off in the background.

Jack tucks his Bluetooth away in a pocket, tells Ravi thanks, and to shove off. He'll take care of this. Then, once he hears the door click shut, he rounds the chair and stands in front of it.

He can see it now: the dent in the left wheel rim from when Ianto had hit it with a cast iron skillet three months ago; the long white skid mark across the right panel when she had drunkenly turned too soon on the way to the loo and scraped the doorjamb. He crouches in front of it and lifts it up, tilting it back—there, the front edge of the underseat, smears of nailpolish, because Lisa wipes excess off on the underside of any surface. These are her colours, too: filigree, sterling, fire engine red.

He lowers the chair back down and leans forward, resting his arms and head on the seat, running scenarios in his head. None of them work. None of them make sense. Actually they all make sense, and his imagination is vivid; it's just that none of them bode well.

His mobile beeps and he ignores it. He knows it's Gwen, calling, as she does every Thursday night at eight, to gossip about Torchwood and everything. The baby is only two months old, and he has told her to come back when she is ready, if she is ever ready (Sometimes he wants her to just quit, for her sake, for his sake, for Ioan and Rhys's sake. Other times he wants her back so badly it aches to go on missions. Contrary, man, contrary.).

The chair rolls a little as he places more weight on it, so he stands and turns, and then sits down, rolling the chair backwards with his feet. It's too small for him, too narrow. It doesn't accommodate his legs and their length. He wonders if Lisa's muscles cramp, or if that's not something they do anymore. He watches her exercise her legs, which is a strange ritual of levering and the like, and wonders not for the first time what it would be like to have parts of him that don't move, no matter how stubborn he is, no matter how singularly devoted he is to their functioning. To have to care for something that is useless, because not having it is worse than dragging it around.

He uses the wheels to tip the front back and balance in the air, mostly because he's always wanted to try it, and it seemed disrespectful to do it in front of Lisa. The chair isn't very tolerant of this—it groans and lists in general disapproval. He lands back down with a thud and stares at the arm of the chair again.

 _…love you. All times…_

Time.

Jack gets out of the chair and wheels it to the SUV, loads it in and drives to the storage unit. He fumbles for the key on his ring, opens the door and wheels the chair in, tucking it neatly between Owen's Bowflex (never used) and Toshiko's carefully wrapped and boxed koto (also never used). When he shuts the door again, he has to open it three more times to check, to make sure that Lisa isn't trapped in there. She's not, of course, but he looks anyway, like a dog circling three times before it lies down.

Three days later, Jack finds himself at the chemist's with a bottle of Beechams and a box of tissues, standing in line and resisting the urge to _really_ flirt with the cashier. She's not even that attractive, in the end, but he likes to make small talk that he finds entertaining. What's more entertaining than sex or kissing? Well, guns maybe. And really, Jack's philosophy is that if you have to make small talk, make small talk that makes someone feel better, feel good about themselves. It's like a small gift; it doesn't cost him anything and makes up for all manner of sins, maybe.

Still, when he unloads the bag back at the penthouse, her mobile number is written on the back of the receipt. He bins it, grinning. Still magic, Harkness.

The sun has set hours ago, and he normally wouldn't be here at this time of night, but Ianto has the flu, the real flu, not a bad cold or something alien, the honest to gods flu, and he has stopped by to drop off some things for Lisa, so that she doesn't have to fight the lift and the car and the everything to get out and pick up some juice. She doesn't look very well herself.

So Jack has tucked them both into bed, brought Lisa's equipment to the bedside so that she doesn't have to get in the chair for her normal ablutions. Ianto does look like death warmed over, actually, when he pulls the covers up to his chin and murmurs something, smiles at the blast of acrid breath that greets him when he bends down to briefly kiss his lips. Lisa throws her arm over Ianto a little and smiles.

'Go away,' she says. But it's a smiley "go away". Jack has been released for recess.

He pours himself a glass of the juice and wanders out onto the balcony, staring at the bay, farther off. The Plass is barely visible from here, but he remembers when he could see the shining lights that illuminated the water tower. He knows that he should be going back to work, that Melissa is waiting for him with an autopsy and that Ravi is stroppy because Ianto is ill so he has to stay late, doing Tech inventory no less, but Jack just wants to stand there and stuff one hand in his pocket, jangle the change that seems to have magically accumulated there (he has no idea what he has purchased to generate the change. Maybe these are magic alien space trousers, ah wait—the chemist's.).

The last thing he ever thinks he will hear starts to grind around him, and he turns, eyes rapidly scanning the patio. There, over by the terraced garden that Lisa works at tirelessly, the TARDIS is materialising, its rotor light blinking. Jack sets his glass on the edge of the balcony, and it topples over the railing and down, all the way to the ground. Jack tears his eyes away from the blue box long enough to make sure that he hasn't killed anyone or anything, and then he saunters to the TARDIS, crossing his arms and trying, for once, to look like the disapproving one.

The door opens and the Doctor all but stumbles out, sheepish smile, cautious, looking about with the general curious aloofness that comes with this model. The suit, as ever, is charming, the shoes, ha ha, still Chucks. Jack is grateful that this is still a Doctor that he knows. Well, even if he hadn't known the body, he does know the Doctor, at least, he hopes he does. He hopes to know the Doctor forever, actually.

'Jack!' The Doctor says, as if he is surprised, but he is never surprised, not about these things. It's his way of diffusing issues, Jack thinks, and he has a lot of practice at it. 'This is different,' the man murmurs. Already Jack is opening his arms for a hug that won't come before refolding them against his chest. The Doctor almost trips then, but it's not a trip. It's part of his charm.

'However did you find me?' he says, because flirting with this man is something he can't avoid. It's like breathing, walking, or in Jack's case, surviving.

The Doctor just walks a few feet to the balcony railing with him and turns. 'Oh the old girl can find you wherever you are, Jack. You know that.' He does that hand wavey thing before he shoves them in his trouser pockets, leaning against the railing and staring at the glass windows of the penthouse. 'That's posh. You really live here?'

Jack shrugs. 'My last place blew up.'

The Doctor glances at him, and then his face muddles. 'Oh yeah, meant to ask about that. That place was convenient, that. Have to go all the way out to…Splott? Is that it?'

Jack laughs. 'I believe estate agents pronounce it "Splow".'

A roll of the eyes. 'The Welsh. Give them something easy and they make it difficult.' He pauses. 'Or maybe they're doing it right and we're all doing it wrong. Minority, majority, meeeeeh,' one hand pulls out of the trousers and waves back and forth. 'Nothing is where it should be these days.'

Jack stares at him then, trying to see the man he'd first met under the glasses and the suit. Because that's the kind of thing the Doctor might have said to him _years_ ago. This Doctor has never confided in him. It's the kind of thing he tells Rose, or Martha.

The gulls have woken up a bit with the arrival of the TARDIS, and a few of them fly down to rest on the top of the Police Box. Jack thinks that it would be just his luck if they shit all over it and Ianto would be mortified—

He thinks about Ianto and Lisa in the other room. They had to have heard the TARDIS. Or maybe the vaporiser that they had bought a few months ago to run on the nights when Ianto is ill (and that has been every other night for the past few weeks) is making enough white noise to drown it out. Maybe Lisa has taken some of the Beechams and they are drugged out. Either way, Jack is sure they will be disappointed that they have missed it.

Which brings him back to the matter at hand, actually. Jack cocks his head at the box, running his eyes over it as familiarly as using his hands, and possibly as lasciviously. He _does_ love that ship. He wants to crawl inside and through her undercarriage, just to see how she works.

Mostly because that information will be relevant in another nine hundred years.

'Why are you here?' he finally asks. 'I mean, I know you can't refuel up here.' He gestures to the penthouse, the general area.

'Oh, that,' the Doctor chirps, frowning off into the distance as if he's thinking. His hair is particularly fantastic today, and Jack's busy looking at the man's Adam's apple and wondering if Ianto and Lisa would think Time Lords were outside the fidelity law—and there is one, he can tell, they just never wrote it out—so he doesn't quite register the Doctor's answer right away. 'I'm here to take Miss Lisa for a ride.' Pause. 'Both of them actually, your Ianto Jones and—'

'He's not my Ianto—'

'Oh hush up.'

Jack starts to wonder then, _really wonder_. Tumblers are clicking in his head. 'Why?'

'You told me to. Well, you will, someday, and I can say that, you told me, because you watched the Bill and Ted movie. In fact, I'm supposed to remind you to watch it aaaaaand—' he raises a finger and his eyes go off center as if he is listening to something that only he can hear. 'There. It's all set. Playing with your timeline is like working with indelible ink, Jack.'

Jack isn't convinced. There's something about the casual way that the Doctor isn't looking directly at him. He's been trained well enough in the ways of Time Travel and Time Lords that he doesn't ask the obvious questions: _How did I know to ask? When do I ask you? Where were we? What are you going to do?_ but he can ask the other one. 'I didn't think I could ever convince you to do anything.' That's so open-ended that it doesn't need an answer.

The Doctor's mouth quirks in one corner as he looks out over the bay. Skypoint is indeed situated in a wonderful spot; that is one of the reasons the owners can demand so much money for the spaces there. Jack knows that Ianto doesn't care about the view as much as he cares about the space, and that Lisa just likes to be up high. He can't blame her—she spends enough time looking up at everyone else.

'You can be very persuasive, Jack,' the Doctor says, deciding to rest his wrists on the railing and lean. 'That said, I think you would know by now. You found it, didn't you?'

 _All times._ Jack does one of those yoga breaths that Lisa has taught him: four counts in, eight counts out.

'You can't have them,' he says, trying to sound chipper.

The Doctor polishes his glasses on his coat. 'I don't _want_ them, Jack, well, not for long.' Here he pauses. 'You do.'

Jack knows that he can't ask much. He cannot ask anything, because he has seen the chair, and all those improbable scenarios are falling away, like shucking corn. The golden grain underneath is coming up, its only mar the silk that still clings to it in places. 'I thought you didn't do this,' he says casually, trying to maintain the complete and utter façade. Who is he kidding? The Doctor knows, he always knows.

'Oh you know, some things are fixed and some things oughtn't to be meddled with.' Then he sighs. 'And sometimes, things are so miniscule that they don't matter. Ripples in a pond.' Casual slip of a smile. 'Are you going to get them, or shall I?' One trainer kicks out in front of him, as if he is booting a football.

Jack removes his hands from his pockets. It's just clicked in his head, like cocking a gun. 'Ianto is dying.' Saying it increases his heartbeat twofold.

The Doctor makes a face. 'Oh dear. Well then.'

Jack shoves off from the wall. 'Just one trip then? That's what I asked you for?'

The Doctor holds up one pointed finger, all the more poignant for his sharp insistence. 'Just one. No side trips. I promise.' He pauses. 'Then again, how would you know if—oh there it goes again.' He sighs, head tilted again as if listening to something silent. The deadlock seal that is Jack's timeline, maybe. 'This is why I have trouble with you Jack.'

Jack doesn't ask. He has the feeling he understands. He backs away from the Doctor, holding up his hands. 'Just. Give me a minute then,' he pleads, as if he is afraid that he'll go inside and when he returns, the TARDIS and its passenger will be gone, phantoms, as if they had never been here at all. For a second Jack entertains the idea that he _is_ talking to a mirage. But nah, if he was going to dream up this scenario, it would have gone so differently. Would be going so very differently.

He moves through the flat quietly, though why he bothers is a mystery, since he's about to wake everyone up. He flips the hallway lights on and opens the bedroom door.

The vaporiser belches out mist from the bedstead, and it reminds Jack of the fog that clogs the roads in the mornings. Jack waves a hand to clear it and turns the machine off. Lisa raises her head and stares at him blearily.

'Back already?' Her hand draws around Ianto's chest, peculiarly possessive.

He smiles and sits on the edge of the bed, running a hand down her warm skin. 'Never left.' He slides his hand from her arm down to Ianto's chest, trying to listen with his fingers. Is it there, in the upper lungs? Or has it taken hold somewhere else? In Ianto's heart, maybe? This alien virus choking his immune system, it will pull and drain and leech until one day Ianto will pick up something in a grocery store, or god help them, something will fall through the Rift that will shred every white blood cell his body can weakly churn out.

The clock ticks next to them, as Jack tries to find Lisa's eyes in the dimness from the hallway light. Now that he understands that Ianto's life is rather literally like sands falling through his fingers, every click of every second feels like a race. It's not, Ianto isn't dying, not quite, not yet, but he wants to drag them both inside the TARDIS and tell the Doctor to take off, to go, to do this thing, whatever that thing is, the thing that had come through the Rift three days ago. The thing that ends with Lisa's wheelchair in the storage closet.

'How much do you trust me?' Jack whispers, 'It's important.'

Lisa doesn't say anything. Her hand finds his and squeezes once, then rests there, fingers curled together over Ianto's chest. It's at that moment that Ianto cracks an eye open and says, 'Infallibly and unwisely,' before coughing a few times. Lisa lifts her hand away, as if she thinks the pressure of it resting on his chest is going to make a difference. Jack splays his palm and can almost feel the clicking of congestion, the raggedy slurry of mucus sluicing inside Ianto's alveoli.

'Okay then, I need you to do that.' He stands and rounds the bed to scoop up Lisa and set her in her chair, and the action itself is doing all the work for him, he hopes, because her eyes are wide. Ianto sits up, grabs a box of tissues and shoves his feet into the slippers on his side of the bed.

'Is this about Wife Swap again?' he asks Jack, but it's a weak joke.

Jack wheels Lisa's chair to the door and gestures for Ianto to go first, that way he can keep an eye on him, as if something might happen to him on the brief trip to the patio. 'Just go outside, smart ass.'

Ianto doesn't argue with him, but Lisa rests her hands on the arm of her chair while Jack pushes her, and she tips her head all the way back so that she can look him in the eye. He's vaguely reminded of the time when he and Gray had drawn faces on their chins and done an upside down puppet show for their parents. He shakes his head to clear it and bites his lip. One of Lisa's hands comes up and she taps his chin.

Ianto almost runs into the sliding glass door, but he manages to stop himself, wrestling with the runner and the handle, almost falling into the half-closed blinds. Jack is ready to follow him out there, but Ianto takes three steps before stopping, and Jack doesn't have to ask why. He just bumps him with Lisa's chair from behind and mumbles something like, 'Beep'.

The doctor has apparently been examining their gardening with interest, and when he hears them he looks up, staring over his glasses, his hands full of petunias. His face lights up a little; Jack knows it's the delight of a new outing in the offing. That's reassuring. If the Doctor isn't worried, then he shouldn't be, either. Right? Jack rounds Ianto's stock-still form and parks Lisa close to the TARDIS, by one of the garden boxes.

'Ms. Hallet-Jones! Lovely! And Mister Jones! Nice to see you again well, sort of see you in person.' The Doctor doesn't offer to shake hands, in fact, he shoves them in his pockets. Good to see that some things don't change with the body.

Ianto's eyes widen and he staggers, but that could be from the shock, or the fact that he's wearing slippers, or the fact that he's running a fever. He has the wry wit to turn to Jack and frown.

'Was there codeine in that cough syrup?'

'Ianto is ill,' Lisa says, her eyes not leaving the TARDIS. Her fingers twitch on her wheels, and Jack wonders if she has ever seen the box before, maybe at Canary Wharf. Maybe he should have given her a heads up about that. Live and learn.

The Doctor peers into Ianto's eyes, and then looks at Jack. 'You _aren't_ well,' he says to Ianto.

Ianto has to sit down then, dropping the box of tissues and holding his head in his hands. Lisa runs her hand on his back in a circle. Jack realises that he has to get them in the TARDIS, that he has to be the one to do it, because the Doctor is just standing there and the Doctor has never had to wrangle, cajole or persuade. It's not what he does. He's a carrot dangler, a carrot dangler in a world full of horses.

'I'm so glad everyone has noticed that,' Ianto groans

Jack crouches down in front of Ianto and looks at Lisa. He will say it to her in his head, and she will get it, because that is the way they have. Telepathy in all things Ianto. And all things pastry-related. He wants to make sure that she understands that this isn't an option, now that he has it sussed, and she gets that, because she wheels away towards the box and its master.

'You're going away,' Ianto says dully.

Jack squeezes one of his hands. 'No, I'm staying here. You're just going for a ride. For fun, you know.' He shrugs. 'Time machine, eh?' He tries to make it seem like a joke, a fun idea, even though Ianto will see right through it. When all he gets is a watered down version of the raised eyebrow, he shrugs and glances at the TARDIS. 'Hey, I need you to trust me on this,' he says, sliding his hand up Ianto's shoulder.

'Are you sending us away?' Ianto whispers, mostly because he is sick, and partly because he is afraid. Ianto is the one horse who will never eat from anyone's hand, Jack thinks.

Oh, and that's a beautiful thing, his eyes widening when Jack takes his face in his hands and kisses him, sick, pukey breath and all, because that's okay, that's human. He presses his forehead to Ianto's and smiles at the sound of Ianto's congested mouthbreathing.

'Not sending. Offering.' He snorts. 'Encouraging. I'll be here when you get back. Promise.' He blinks a little bit longer than he had intended. 'I _need_ you to go.'

Ianto sighs. 'This is about me, isn't it?' He kicks the tissue box. 'I'm not stupid.'

Jack smiles. 'Never said you were. Ever.'

'I'm sick.'

'You are.'

'And this is going to make it better.'

Jack can't say anything, because he's not sure if that's the case. For all he knows, the Doctor is lying to him, and he takes the two of them off and they start a whole new life in the colony of Thrakis 4 where the valleys are lush and there is no disease at all. Or maybe he takes them and Ianto is cured and they decide to travel with the Doctor until one of them is irrevocably broken. Because that is what happens, really, there's always heartbreak. But you can't blame a light bulb when a moth hits it. You can't blame the moth either.

Ianto coughs into his hand, and something rattles in his throat. Jack hands him a wad of tissues to wheeze into and they come away bloody. Ianto stares at them dully, as if he is not surprised, as if this is not something new, and Jack resists the urge to shake him and ask him how long that has been going on, because shaking Ianto while he's sick isn't right (and also because shaking Ianto is just never done).

'Okay then,' Ianto says, 'I suppose that's that.' He wads the tissues up and shoves them in his pajama pocket, patting it down so that it lies flatter. Jack resists the urge to pull them out and shove them in his own pocket to throw away later. Humans like to deal with their own bio-waste.

Ianto clearly isn't sold on the idea, and Jack has no idea how he managed to convince him, except that maybe it is the Beechams and the flu, and Lisa, who is busily and animatedly talking to the Doctor about something, machinery, ballet, The Master and Margarita maybe. His legs are shaky when he stands, but he leans heavily on Jack and that allows them both to embrace without it seeming like one or the other is too needy. Over Ianto's shoulder, Lisa's eyes are afire, and whatever the Doctor has said to her in their little chat has steeled her resolve, calmed her apprehension about what is to happen. Jack wishes that someone would calm _his_ apprehension; why is doing the right thing, as convoluted and unsure as it feels, always so very difficult?

When Ianto pulls away, Jack brushes something invisible from his shoulder. 'Remember to tell him how much bigger it is on the inside,' he whispers. 'He loves that.'

Ianto nods then and shuffles towards the open door, stopping once to peer inside, just like he does when he is about to clear a room with his firearm or get into the shower that Jack has turned on (Okay, he'd turned on the cold just _once_ , and it had been _funny_.). Jack rolls his eyes at Lisa when she smacks Ianto's bum and tells him to hustle. Jack feels reminiscently like he used to when he'd drop Alice off at camp for the summer. The Doctor follows them and mumbles a few things as they walk further into the TARDIS, but then he backs out and turns to Jack, hands in pockets again.

'Well then, you can't say that I have never done—'

Jack waves a hand. 'Spoilers,' he reminds him, and the Doctor smiles.

The Doctor tilts his head, nodding backwards at the open door. 'You know he has—'

Jack stops him. 'Yeah, I thought so. Fix it.' He sits down on the cement block retaining wall for the garden.

Those sharp eyes gleam, and the mouth quirks when the Doctor steps into the doorway of the TARDIS, his hand running up and down the jamb absently. 'I'd ask how he got it, but it doesn't matter.'

Jack sighs. 'They came here for the children,' he whispers. He's tired of talking about it, about what he'd done in 1965.

The Doctor's face sours. 'They're gone, I gather.'

Jack smiles. 'The Shadow Proclamation ain't got nothing on me,' he sings, and it's true. The Doctor is the Earth's sometimes hero. Jack is the steady caretaker, at least for now, and that's good by him.

They stand there in awkward silence, and then Jack hears Ianto's hacking and coughing coming from inside the ship and he understands that what he had been ignoring, hoping that it would go away, is reaching critical mass inside Ianto's body, and that they hadn't saved him at Thames House, but rather just delayed, perhaps for this moment. Now, time is of the essence, and the man in front of him has nothing but that to dole out.

He starts scheming now for ways to make the Doctor owe him enough to grant him this later, whenever that is.

The Doctor raises a hand and smiles. 'We'll meet at the old place, or well, somewhere near the old place. A week at the most. I promise.'

Time promises from a time traveller should be set in stone, but no, that just makes them more fluid. And the TARDIS will land where and when she lands. Jack simply waves a hand. 'Go on, go. See you on the flip side.'

He doesn't get an answer. The door shuts and he closes his eyes through the whole thing, because one of the worst sights in the universe, in his rather extended experience, has been watching this ship disappear.

When they are gone, he finds Lisa's bottle of Maker's Mark and plays the "woe is me" game until he falls asleep in the bathtub, the shower on full tilt. He wakes to Ravi shaking his shoulder and demanding to know what has happened. Oh that's right, he has a job that he does here in this time. He feebly fields their questions later, finally laying down the law: Lisa and Ianto are gone on holiday and they will be back, he doesn't know when, yes they are fine.

The next day, on the way to work, Jack stops to stand on the Plass and watch the gulls virtually attack a small woman who has a pasty. He observes the workers filling in the holes where the lower levels used to be. He calculates how much retcon they'll have to dole out when the effort is all over. He shrugs, retreats to his office, and sits at his desk, watching Ravi and Melissa argue about some sort of alien button. He fiddles with the Internet and pirates a few things.

When they have left for the evening, he orders Chinese and calls up the film and watches it. He doesn't laugh when he knows he is supposed to (although, okay, Ghengis Khan wrecking a sporting goods store is kinda funny), and he cackles at inappropriate moments when he is sure that anyone else probably wouldn't. And when he gets to the end (thank god it's over), he understands why he did it that way. He programs a note to himself in his wrist strap that says, "Bill and Ted and Lisa and Ianto." And then leaves it at that.

It feels as if time has sealed itself, though one day he wants to hear a hermetic seal noise, just for kicks.

He waits on the Plass every day for a few minutes at noon, but they don't return until Tuesday. Five days. He almost is afraid for the door to open. And then it does.

*~*~*~*~*~*

IANTO

Ever a traditionalist, Ianto had set himself on hating the new archives, despite that they had been constructed per his specifications (and some Victorian guidelines in the Torchwood charter that he couldn't bypass). He hadn't wanted a new system. The old one had been just fine, thank you very much.

And so he had sullenly followed Jack and Gwen down into the new archives, resisting the urge to cross his arms, and then, when the auto lights had blinked on, he'd almost come in his trousers right there in front of God, Wales and everyone.

There are hermetic seals, deadlock seals, drawers in the walls. There is a clean room, four of them, in fact. Twelve blast rooms, one lead lined storage cell (in case they get their hands on some Kryptonite, Jack jokes), seven, count them, seven rooms for the card catalogue that he will construct just to navigate the archives alone. There is a humidified room, a cool room for things that need to be kept at a lower temperature. There is a morgue (cryo storage is technically part of the archives) five times larger than the one they used to have, and already sadly stocked with a dozen bodies. There's a storage closet for his supplies that is relatively similar in size to his London flat.

Ianto'd had to sit down the first time he saw the whole place, but that had been less from shock and more from illness. Now that he has gone to the other side of time and back, that isn't an issue anymore.

Ianto doesn't talk about the time he'd spent in the TARDIS. Sometimes he and Lisa talk about New New York, and the Face of Boe, the person they had met there briefly (The Doctor hadn't been rather keen on them talking to The Face; in fact, he'd been peeved that he'd--it'd? she'd?--somehow shown up there out of the blue.). Upon their return Jack hadn't pressed them, said something about spoilers and laughed, and anything they might have told him about their two weeks (five days!) away is still locked in their chests, dying to come out, like a music box that only plays when the lid is lifted.

So they talk about it in the dark, the visit to the Hospital, the cat-nun-people, the treatments, the trip back, which had been blessedly event-free. Ianto feels as if he has had his one adventure of a lifetime, like how people save for years to go on a Caribbean cruise, and then talk about it for the rest of their lives.

Except Jack doesn't want to hear. Ianto knows why. It's just stymieing, is all.

So he is in the middle of cataloguing something stubbornly heavy and a little sticky ('It's just going to be like that,' Jack says, 'so wrap it in plastic and shove it in the archives.') when Jack calls over the comms that they should all go home. He taps his comm to answer, but Ravi is already whooping into it, and he hears the clatter of metal steps in the background as he races Melissa to the exit. Gwen murmurs something to them both that is non-committal and tired, and he can completely sympathise. He would like to go home, as well.

But he stays for Jack, leaving the archives and mounting the stairs, finding Jack at his desk, cleaning his gun and smiling.

'Early night,' Ianto says, 'What's the occasion?'

Jack snaps the auto loader into place. 'Dead Rift activity. Gwen's looking wasted. You—' he looks up at Ianto and raises an eyebrow, 'Look as if you haven't had a good night's sleep in ages.'

Ianto sits across from him and slouches down in his chair, a gentleman's ungentleman. 'I believe you are to blame for a great deal of that,' he says.

Jack's face is unreadable. 'We don't know that for sure. We could do testing—'

Ianto snorts. 'I think Lisa wants it to be a mystery.'

Jack cocks his head. 'And you? Mister I Know Everything?'

Ianto thinks about that for a second before replying. The answer is fitting for the moment. 'I know everything I need to know for now.'

Jack doesn't reply, but packs his kit away, stowing the gun in the desk drawer. Ianto doesn't move when Jack rises from the desk, crosses the room, and kneels in front of his chair, wedging himself in between Ianto's parted legs. His hands slide up Ianto's thighs, up to the waistband on the sides to pull at the small love handles that Ianto is trying to get rid of. Ianto squirms and Jack smiles into his knee, mumbles something about sexiness. His fingers continue their jaunt up the starched shirt to the underarms, and then slide behind to scratch the shoulder blades before tracing the spine back down to the waist, where they tug, and Ianto slides further down the chair and a little forward. He plants his feet on the floor and grins.

Jack shakes his head, groans into Ianto's thigh. 'Still fantastic, Jones, Ianto Jones.'

'Hrm,' Ianto replies, because in some ways he doubts it, and other ways he is too sure. They make him sexy, he is sure of it, but without them, he is just a council estate chav with a good vocabulary and a vast knowledge of men's dress wear.

Jack obviously has plans for their position, or maybe not. As Ianto runs his hands through the spikes in Jack's hair, he contemplates the dusting of gray he sees. Jack isn't aging physically, not bodily, but stressors sometimes come to wreak havoc on him, and they have decided that gray hair is apparently his body's tell. Jack plucks them, and they have noticed that they grow back in brown, but stress will turn some of them, a strange physiological thing Ianto only ever remembers seeing in _Poltergeist_ , a film from which he wouldn't choose to glean accurate medical information.

The quietness of the Hub, and they only call it that because that's what they called the old place, invades the room and settles in on them, a wet, plaster shell of silence. He finds himself listening for the fall of water where there is none. He wonders if the others would think him odd for setting up a recording of it; the water had been foul sometimes, and it had played merry cob with the electronics, especially in the summers, but the sound of it had been calming. He'd often suspected that the water sound had soothed Owen after certain stressful nights, and more than once he had caught Tosh before she had fallen asleep in her chair at her workstation, to which she had remarked on the hypnotic sounds of the tower and pool.

Ianto finds that he looks back a great deal more than he used to, probably because this new place, for all that it is new no longer, isn't anything like the old place. It's better, certainly, but not the same thing. Other issues have chosen to resurrect the past in his personal life, Ianto knows, and that merits thought as well, but not right at this moment, not when Jack is sleepy-eyed with his cheek resting against Ianto's thigh, hands kneading the flesh of Ianto's hips.

'Would you be angry with me if I told you I'm too tired for this?' Jack asks. 'Jesus, too tired for sex. What the hell is wrong with me?' He presses his lips to Ianto's clothed leg and sits back, arms sliding down Ianto's thighs.

Ianto leans forward then, bracing his hands on Jack's forearms. 'Come on. Let's go home.'

They don't even bother to take the same car. Ianto knows that Jack will leave in the middle of the night, that he doesn't like leaving the Hub unattended. He might stay into the night, though, he might putter about in his room, or play with the juicer in the kitchen. He might do many things. Jack has his own routine, or rather, lack thereof, and living with him is living with that.

Ianto has his own routines.

They take the lift up, and as he loosens his tie, Jack's hand can't seem to resist coming to rest on the hollow of his neck, secret smile just for him, secret smile that means something when one is in on the secret. Ianto wonders when everyone important in his life developed secret expressions around him, ones that he cannot interpret.

Lisa looks up when they come in the door, and Jack flings his coat on the back of the sofa. Ianto toes his shoes off and stands there, inspecting the room: everything is in place; nothing is out of the ordinary. Lisa is smiling and Jack has fallen over the back of the sofa to lie on his back on the cushion, head tilted to face her, laughing softly. She reaches out with one hand to ruffle his hair.

Ianto hangs up his coat and wonders if there is any coffee in the carafe. He would make fresh, but he's damn tired, and his new stance, as of late, has been that beggars cannot be choosers.

On his way to the kitchen, he trips over the diaper bag and almost cracks his head open on the edge of the counter. Jack and Lisa raise their heads in alarm and Jack rolls off the sofa to collect him, pulling him by his wrists and tutting about sleep deprivation. He deposits Ianto on the sofa, and Lisa kisses his temple, then hands over his son before standing and promising to make him some tea.

Ianto is torn between watching her walk freely and of her own volition to the kitchen, and the little face that blinks up at him, eyes drooping and hands waving a little bit. Both are equally befuddling. Jack and Lisa play about in the kitchen, but Ianto dulls them out, staring at the baby's skin, his eyes, his toothless mouth that roots for Lisa's breasts even when he brushes his finger against his cheek.

He smiles at the brown eyes, no longer baby blue, and the shock of black hair on his head. He lifts the child up and onto his stomach so that he rests against his own chest, and something about the weight of it makes his heart skip a bit.

Something Ravi had told him weeks ago sticks with him, something about, 'They're different when they're your kids, man. Don't have any meself, but that's what they always say.' That's an interesting thought. He knows that Gwen would agree.

Jack has done the hand waving "Nah, I'm bad with kids" thing, and Ianto doesn't believe a word of it, but he humors it. He thinks to himself that it is reassuring that Jack is still here, with them, actually, and that should the inevitable happen, their son will have someone to look after him. That Lisa will have someone to look after her, to not retcon her into tomorrow and just wash their hands of her.

Ianto knows that he's the one who isn't good with children. He doesn't know what his son feels, and Lisa says that that is normal. How could he possibly understand what is going on in what Lisa lovingly refers to as his "peanut brain"? He rests his head on the back of the sofa and closes his eyes, knowing that there will be kid drool on this shirt. That's okay then, anyway. Kid drool will wash.

Jack wakes him up by pulling the baby from his chest. He holds him in his hands and turns him, letting the infant rest on his shoulder, one hand placed under his bum, and walks away, his torso twisting a little as he walks as if he is the human swing. Ianto blinks and rubs his eyes.

Lisa sits down next to him and hands him a mug of tea, her own eyes tracking Jack's journey to the back bedroom and its rugby border and jungle bedding.

'Before you start,' Lisa says quietly, 'he wanted to.' They hear humming and the slight click of the mobile being wound.

Ianto turns his head and buries his face in her neck. 'God, I don't have the strength to fight you anymore about it. What happens to us will happen.' When he breathes deep, she smells like baby oil and milk.

Lisa snorts. 'That's how life is, sweetheart. It happens.' She steals his mug and sips his tea. 'And what Jack does, he does.'

*~*~*~*~*~*

LISA

It's surreal, and entirely Gwen's fault. It's probably because she has been trying and succeeding in remaking Torchwood in her own image, and Jack has, for whatever secret reasons, been allowing it. Lisa knows about as much about the inner workings of Torchwood Three as anyone who works there, and sometimes she fancies that she should just get a job there, but that would be too much, too much for them all, for her. Her legs still twitch in the evenings, no matter what amazing fifty billionth-century treatment the Doctor granted her, and when she dreams, she still cannot walk.

She wonders if she will ever run in her dreams again.

But here they all are, some bizarre rag-tag group gathered for an afternoon at the park: Ravi with his sisters and Melissa and her girlfriend all chatting at a park table, young and carefree; Rhys and Gwen playing tumble and badminton with Mica and Steven and David; Ianto and Jack sitting off to the side in folding chairs, their feet touching. One of Jack's bare feet rocks the bouncer that Gwen and Rhys's little Ioan is working as if he can take off for the stars at any minute.

Lisa sips from her Coke and listens to Rhiannon coo over her son. On the other side of her, Alice is lax and boneless, the result of too many lagers.

Alice has introduced herself as Jack's sister, and no one bats an eye. Lisa is grateful that they think she's the younger sister, because she'd had to cajole Alice into coming (Gwen had given her the task and she hadn't wanted it, actually, but for different reasons. Jack had shrugged and said, 'If she wants to, she'll come'), and she isn't sure that it would be going nearly as well as it has been if people had thought her older.

'What are you naming this little thing?' Rhiannon says, putting the child on her shoulder.

Lisa squints into the sun. 'I don't know.'

It's been over a month with no name for the child. Jack calls him "Nugget". Ianto calls him "the baby" or "my boy". Lisa calls him "Little Mister". Every once in a while they toss names out over the dinner table or in the dark of night, spooned around each other like large cats. Nothing seems to fit. Once Ianto had texted her, 'j says nick. nicky? niiiiiick.' And she had texted back, 'no. 2 much father christmas.'

Rhiannon fusses with the baby's overly-precious toes. 'You have to name him eventually.' She looks up. 'Our tad was named "Alun".' Lisa smiles, but Rhiannon quickly amends, 'But Ianto probably wouldn't want that.' The baby waves his fists and makes a noise and Lisa takes him from Rhiannon, unbuttoning her shirt and unhooking her bra. She's a modern woman; this doesn't bother her.

Across the grass, Jack's eyes glitter and he smiles. She sees his hand ghost over Ianto's when he hands him a beer, and she wonders what they're talking about. Sometimes they have a secret language that isn't Torchwood or their home life. Ianto and Jack speak in gestures and half phrases that she has yet to decipher, and she has pretty much been there from the beginning. It's comforting, in a way.

Alice tilts her head, winding a shredded serviette over her index finger until the tip is purple. 'I'm surprised. My—Lucia always said that Jack had names picked. Wanted to name his kid Gray if it was a boy.' She sighed. 'Gray. Dismal.'

Lisa lets the baby latch onto her breast and can't help but shudder. It's a sweet sensation, and she wonders if she'll miss it when the baby is weaned and on formula or cow's milk. Alice watches her with interest.

'I have to ask,' she says, and it occurs to Lisa that Alice is related, possibly, to this little thing, and that might be something she would be interested in.

Upon their return from the future, from the stars, Lisa and Jack and Ianto had spent a frenzied three weeks re-learning everything. Lisa's repaired nervous system had opened the world to her not unlike rediscovering an old, long shut-off wing of a library that is filled with one's favorite books—she had fallen on them like something indescribable. Something that she would claim smells and tastes like peaches.

Even now she doesn't regret it, filled nights on her knees, or with Jack behind her, Ianto in front, or pressed up against the wall of the shower, or riding one or the other of them on the patio ground, or in the garden boxes (Jack had made fertility jokes, and now, now.). She hadn't even thought of the pill, they hadn't used condoms in years, not quite, and maybe they had all decided that it hadn't mattered. Maybe the moment she had run from the TARDIS and into Jack's arms, showing him, look, look what I can do now, they had all decided that they could plow through everything together. Maybe they had declared in silent kisses and sweaty limbs and giggling orgasms that they weren't afraid of anything.

And she isn't. Not so much when Ianto doesn't need the vapouriser anymore and they had thrown it out even though they had known that they would just need to get another one for the baby, one that looks like a blue penguin. Her chair is gone; she hadn't even brought it back to Cardiff with her, just shoved it out of the TARDIS as they barreled through the cosmos (Ianto had carved a message on the arm, a message he had told her will spin in the void for all time, and which in some way, she agrees, makes it true forever.). Jack sits with her and the baby sometimes, whilst Ianto sleeps and she's up, breastfeeding, and they talk about the Doctor, about New New Earth and the people she'd met there, but only in very vague terms. Jack doesn't want to know any details about the planet or the people. He doesn't want to know their names. She thinks ruefully that Jack is trying not to spoil himself, because he'll get there eventually, one way or another. That doesn't frighten her, either.

Lisa knows that Alice has asked her about the baby, and she knows what it is implying, and so she gives her the only answer she has.

'I honestly don't know,' she finally replies.

It's not that she doesn't want to know. It's that she feels as if she _shouldn't_ know. Perhaps if the baby grows up to be a child and then a man, they will see whom he more closely resembles, and then they will know. Perhaps he will learn to walk and talk and dance and fight and they will never be able to see in his face, in his body, in his manner, who he is more like, and that might mean more than any computer printout could ever tell them.

They pretend that he is Ianto's, and everyone but the three of them is fooled. And maybe Gwen, but she has never cared about those things, anyway.

Johnny, Rhiannon's husband, joins the game, and he and Rhys allow themselves to be tackled by the kids. Gwen lies on her back in the grass, and her knees are stained green. Jack and Ianto laugh at something they've said. The baby lets go and she switches breasts, even though she doesn't usually. She wants this moment to stretch out a little longer; the medical books she has say that breastfeeding releases a drug into her system, and it feels hazy, like she could sleep soon. Maybe she will, just lie on a blanket in the grass with the baby in her arms and trust that everyone here will keep an eye on her.

Alice sighs and stretches, cat-like, her arms shooting in the air like delicate, drunken fronds. Rhiannon smiles at the game on the grass, then looks at Lisa. 'Ianto was an unhappy child,' she says, 'and God knows I tried, but with mam gone, he just never seemed to settle.'

Lisa glances over at Ianto, lax and happy in the sun. She knows that he is happy because his eyes are closed. When Ianto is disturbed, his eyes widen and he cannot stop looking around. Now though, the sun hits him and he tilts his face up to it. Jack's finger beats a rhythm on the arm of his chair, because he is never at rest, he just affects it well.

'I was a happy child,' she tells Rhiannon, 'but I was a broody teenager. That's slightly worse, I think.' She cocks her head. 'At least with Ianto you know what you're in for.'

Rhiannon smiles into her drink. 'Well, with the three,' she pauses, 'the four of you, I don't worry as much.' She gestures with her glass. 'You never quite stop worrying, and I wouldn't have picked it, but your thing is good.'

Lisa crooks her mouth up when Ianto turns his head to blink at her, as if he is checking to make sure she is still there and she feels rooted to the spot. Yeah, still here.

Ravi stands up alarmedly and pulls something from his belt, then glances at Jack. Ianto sets his beer down and glances at his watch as he rolls his trouser legs down. Gwen's face can't hide the disappointment when she jogs over to Jack and they confer with bowed heads before she scoops her son up in her arms and showers him with kisses.

Well, an hour forty without disaster. Job well done.

Alice's face is one of cynical amusement, but she lets Jack kiss her cheek and grab Steven in a bear hug before he turns to press his lips to Lisa's, one hand reaching out to run along the baby's head. It is easy to miss, and Lisa is surprised that he has done it.

'Roger?' he whispers to her.

Her mouth curves; she can feel it. 'Executive veto. Roger Moore.'

He snaps his fingers as he backs away, smiling. 'Rats.'

Melissa pecks her girlfriend on her cheek and Gwen leaves Ioan crying in Rhys's arms as they all race for the SUV. Ianto is last, pulling her in and nuzzling her neck before bending down to smell his son's head and smile to himself, eyes closed, and she wonders if he is, in this moment, taking up the mantle that has been hovering above his shoulders. Or if he understands that when he runs for the SUV, leaving Lisa to explain that they all have to go to work, special ops, yeah, that it could be the last time he sees them (They can't have known Melissa wouldn't be coming back. That Ianto would almost lose his sight. That Gwen would have a limp for the rest of her life.).

Maybe it's the family, the setting that does it, but whatever it is, the relief of it makes Lisa smile at his retreating form. Rhiannon huffs and sits back in her chair. 'Special ops, really?' she asks. 'Like some sort of spy?'

Alice snorts, but she bites her lower lip, her grin wry. 'Special ops,' she confirms. Because Alice can play the company game as well. Lisa likes her for that. She wonders if in looking at Alice, she is seeing her own child's future.

Alice meets her eyes, and Jesus, is her father in them, no matter how brown they are. Something about the arch of her brow. Lisa wonders what she looks like when she fights, full out, violent, maybe she never has, but somehow Lisa doubts that. She wonders if Alice thrums with extra life. Not immortality, of course, but something extra, something special.

She wonders what Jack's DNA looks like under a scanner.

'If you had another boy,' Lisa asks her, 'what would you call him?'

*~*~*~*~*~*

JACK

So with Ianto and Gwen in London ('Could Torchwood please send two representatives that are _not_ Captain Harkness? The Home Office steno pool will be quite distracted if there is a repeat of last time'), Jack finds himself in the SUV with Ravi and their convenient backup, Rhys Williams. Rhys is actually a better shot than Ravi, and Jack's seen him in action with golf clubs, a chainsaw and a butcher block, so he thinks that Rhys is an appropriate substitute for Gwen, minus the police skills and the training, and the years on the job.

On the downside, if something happens to Rhys, if he gets a hangnail or a split end, Gwen will cut off Jack's balls and sauté them in brown butter. Torchwood would be paying for a child-minder too, if Lisa hadn't taken Ioan. Jack rolls his eyes at the idea of babysitting expenses being a fiscal Torchwood concern.

Ravi reclines his seat and puts one trainer-clad foot on the dashboard. Jack half wants it to trigger the airbag just for kicks, but then he remembers that he likes Ravi, and that they're supposed to be working, and that airbags have dust. And the SUV won't restart with a blown bag. Stupid twenty-first century computers.

They are waiting for this Gleeph gambling ring to break up, and then they're going to irradiate all of them with blacklight so that they turn green, the idea being that the Gleeph will be so embarrassed about their unsightly colour that they'll just…shove off the planet and never come back.

Jack loves the idea of it. He almost left his gun back at the Hub. Almost.

'So she wants to get married,' Ravi says darkly. 'Married. Like permanent.'

'That's what a marriage is, Rav,' Jack jokes.

'Open marriage, I says, and she gets all stroppy,' Ravi continues, and Jack winces. Rhys whistles under his breath. 'What? I'm not ready.' He turns to the backseat. 'How did you know when you were ready?'

Jack glances at Rhys in the rearview mirror. He's curious himself. He has his own answers to this, but they involve hand waving and a good impression of the Doctor saying, 'Weeeeeell, it's all timey-wimey.'

Rhys smiles and glances out the window. 'Oh, I just knew.'

Jack cannot resist a grin of his own. The rain starts then, pounding on the windshield like a car wash. Huh. He is supposed to wash the SUV while Ianto is away, but he wonders if he can just get away with driving it around extremely fast through the downpour. Ianto will probably glance at the undercarriage and then give him his disappointed face (Jack thinks his disappointed frowny face is hysterical, but chooses not to tell him that.).

Ravi turns back around and sighs. 'There's just so many girls, man.'

'How long has it been since you had one of those other nebulous girls?' Jack asks, because he figures that if they have to wait here, they might as well have a little chat. 'Or a boy. I don't like to discriminate.'

Ravi snorts. 'Not my style, man.'

Jack boggles, not for the first time, at the fact that he has finally, _completely unintentionally_ , managed to hire someone who is actually straight. Not bi, or bi-curious, or in the closet, but straight. Ravi is adorable in his honesty about it, saying, 'Yeah, well, I tried to have a threesome once, me girl and this other bloke, but I just couldn't get it up. We were all hot and heavy and there she was, begging for it, and I just couldn't.'

Jack says something about performance anxiety and Ravi smiles, toying with the tech in his hand, something small and useless to keep his fingers busy, no doubt. 'Oh no, like to keep an open mind. Picked up a bloke in a pub to see what the fuss was about; he sucked me off in the head.' He shrugged. 'Just kept wishing it was someone with a pair of tits, and well. A mouth's a mouth, but girls, man, girls are stellar. But I wanted to be sure.'

Jack gives it some thought that maybe there are some people who are straight and some people who are gay, no matter how many people fall in between. And he wonders when his horse had got so goddamn high. Huh. Ravi sighs out the window. 'You, man, I can see why you do it, you know, I just think it'd be better if they were both birds.'

Jack stops to think about Ianto as a woman, because that deserves a moment's consideration. Then that switches to himself as a woman and Ianto as a man, or he and Ianto as women and Lisa with a giant cock…wow, he has a job to do here. He clears his throat and puts his hands on the motionless steering wheel.

'There are advantages,' he says. Rhys grunts from the backseat. Jack had almost forgotten he was there for a second. He looks for Rhys again and their eyes meet in the mirror.

Jack and Rhys had only had sex the one time, in the hot tub, but man, it had been a good ride. Well, Jack had thought it was. He wouldn't have minded another go or four, or five, but Rhys isn't that kind of swinger. Wasn't. Now he's all family man, and Jack is comforted by the fact that he doesn't seem to care about what happened at the penthouse, that he is content with the past, how everything happened, and he doesn't mind acknowledging it.

Jack deliberately doesn't mention it, not because it is awkward, but because it is the right thing to do. Rhys will only take so much, and casual flirting is off the menu now.

'I like the sex and the closeness and all that. What do they call that, intimacy?' Ravi shrugs. 'It's the other stuff I can do without,' he adds. 'Doin' the dishes, meetin' the in-laws, _livin' together_.'

'Leaving the loo seat down,' Rhys chimes in.

'Telling her she looks beautiful first thing in the morning,' Ravi says, and there, Jack grins out the window and refrains from mentioning that everyone looks kinda scrotty first thing in the morning, even Ravi.

Jack won't admit that sometimes he prefers it, because it is unguarded, real, uncomplicated, those first fifteen minutes in which no one is awake and they stumble about in the bathroom, prepping the shower, brushing teeth. Ianto's hair is always a mess, and Lisa is usually so groggy that she tells Jack the truth about anything he asks. He always asks her where she's hidden all the Hob-Nobs; he has priorities.

Well, okay, he likes the first fifteen minutes directly _after_ Ianto brushes his teeth, because man, that's nasty. Lisa wouldn't let him kiss her that early in the morning if her mouth was on fire and his was a fire extinguisher. He's tried and been decked.

Jack thinks about the last time he did the dishes and cannot remember. They have an autowasher, and Lisa is pretty much on top of that, these days. Ianto likes to wash dishes, actually. Ianto likes to wipe dirt from a lot of things. Ianto likes the appearance of cleanliness. Jack just prefers that things not have a layer of scum on them.

Lisa's parents had visited right after the baby had arrived. Jack had voluntarily bunked in the Hub, waving his hands and saying something about how the twenty-first century changes only so much. They had stayed for a week, and then gone back to their home in Little Whinging, Privet Drive, wherever. Lisa had waved a hand dismissively and said something about cupboards and Dementors.

'Oh look,' Ravi says, 'they're coming.' Jack follows his finger to the Gleeph emerging from the warehouse door. They all look a little pink; that's about to change. Rhys is already fingering the big modified light on the stick that they have rigged. This is going to be epically funny, if only for the fact that Jack hates Gleeph because they always cheat at Qrilinium Blackjack, and he still remembers a particularly stunning loss he'd sustained that had ended in losing his shirt, literally.

At least John had thought it funny. Then again, what John finds funny is always hit and miss, mostly miss.

Jack flips his collar up and feels the little heartbeat increase that he gets when he's about to confront something, for whatever reason. Sometimes his hands shake, but not today. Today is for fun. 'All right then, gentlemen,' he says, dredging a line from somewhere in his brain's recesses, 'It's time to make the donuts.'

Behind him, Rhys groans as he gets out of the car. 'You're daft, Harkness.'

Well, yeah, sometimes.

It works like a charm. Jack has never had a mission go so well, or so humorously. Rhys had waved the light stick, and Ravi had shouted 'fire in th' hole!' and then the flash had hit all the Gleephs at once, and when it fizzled out (the battery pack has a life of about ten seconds, stupid alien tech), they had had five green splotchy Gleephs keening and wailing. Jack had given them his "I'm the Sheriff of Cardiff-ham-ford-shire" speech, and then the three of them had escorted the Gleeph to their ship and made them solemnly swear to never return. The likelihood that they will is slim, but Jack takes their ship's internal schematics anyway, and then he sets their Navistar Flight memory for Earth to self-destruct in ten minutes.

Everybody lives.

They drop Ravi off at his place, and Jack can see the lights on. His girl is waiting up for him.

Jack wants to grab his wrist as he gets out, grab it and say, 'Put a ring on her finger. Trust me,' but he doesn't give that kind of advice. And it's none of his business. Well, it's not Torchwood business, so he has no say, and your boss telling you to get married sounds off. Plus, Jack doesn't know Sandy, doesn't know what she's like, other than what Ravi mentions (and he's crazy about her, Jack can tell from the look in his eye), so he won't add his two pence.

On the way back to the flat though, Rhys sighs and chuckles. 'He needs to just up and marry that girl.'

When he and Rhys return to the penthouse, Lisa is asleep in the bedroom, the baby in his cot, and Ioan settled in her arms. She rouses enough to transfer the toddler to Rhys's capable hands and then rolls backward onto the bed, already in dreamland.

Jack wanders out into the living area, spinning the rattle globe on Evan's bouncer, because he likes the circus lights. He shoves his hands in his pockets and listens to the short electronic tune that plays for about five seconds. He doubles back out of curiosity and steps into Evan's room. Sometimes, he just needs to see him, as if he's afraid that he'll turn away and Evan will be gone. He thinks about Jonah Bevan, who has recently died out at Flat Holm, and how one day he had been a teenager coming home from practice and then the next, just gone, lost to the Rift and then returned, broken and old.

The vapouriser is running because Evan has a cold, Jack knows, and even as he enters he knows that he shouldn't. Jack smiles at the clay nameplate hanging on the door, the big "E" backwards as a joke when Stephen had made it in school and given it to him the last time he had dropped in on Alice. She'd named the baby, Lisa had told them suddenly a few nights after the mission crisis had died down and Melissa's cold body had been tucked into a vault, and they had been lying in the dark, listening to the quiet snores of the kid in the middle of the bed. Jack doesn't ask Lisa why she had picked that name, but Alice is chuffed a little, and Jack can live with that. God, he could live with that forever, but he knows that someday he will disappoint Alice, and their fragile peace will be broken.

Evan is asleep on his back, and Jack doesn't want to touch him, wake him. He just wants to lay two fingers on his head, on his hair, feel the warmth from his skin, then back away slowly and close the door on the green glow of the night light.

While he walks down the hallway, Jack thinks about Ravi and the things that he doesn't like to do. He glances at the photos of the three of them on the wall at the end of the hallway, the hallway of family photos that Lisa and Ianto plaster up everywhere they live. It's a double picture of the three of them at Gwen and Rhys's wedding, back to back with one from right after Evan had been born. Ianto and Lisa are slung about each other in the pictures. In the first, Jack is on Lisa's other side, extra, added on. In the second, he is behind them, cheek resting on the crown of Lisa's head as she looks at the baby in her arms. Still pasted on, Jack. Photoshopped into their lives.

The kitchen is overflowing with dishes, because the autowasher is broken and they have been washing manually, but with two children under the age of three in the house for the evening, Lisa is probably worn. Bottles with shrunken liners stack in the sink, Ioan's 'sippy cups' and a few of Lisa's own dishes as well.

Jack looks backwards once at the pictures on the wall, rolls up his sleeves and turns on the tap, bent on affixing himself for good.

*~*~*~*~*~*

LISA

She loves the fact that Jack sleeps in the center sometimes. Because that's how it has to be sometimes, on the days in which Ianto is angry at the baby and she is angry at him or any number of reasons, and rarely are they upset at Jack. Well, rarely is Lisa upset at Jack. When she does get cross with Jack, it's usually for something so inconsequential that she doesn't even tell him what it is. She just sort of grits her teeth at the dirty dishes in the sink, or the biro that has been washed with a load of shirts and tells herself that this? Not the end of the universe. Not by a long shot.

When Ianto is upset with Jack it is always over something work-related, and she can understand that. They have places in which they reside at work, and that has almost never followed them home, except on certain occasions, and on those occasions Jack sleeps on the sofa, voluntarily, or on the other side of Lisa, turned away from her so that she can spoon him, and even then, Ianto presses up against her back and reaches over her hip to touch Jack, as if skin will make everything better. Sometimes it does.

On the very very odd occasions that it is Jack who is angry, he doesn't come home.

But often, Lisa can sense that Ianto is worried. Worried about what is going to happen to them, all of them. She often wonders if Ianto would freeze time if he could, freeze them all together in this flat. If she were to ask him, he would deny it; he probably doesn't think about it in that way, and he certainly carries a great deal of love for their child, in that detached parent way that she often sees in men his age.

Still. It's all rather mystifying. Not unlike any number of amazing things that have happened to her in the past year, starting with the fact that she is wiggling her toes as she lies on the sofa.

Jack comes to her in the morning, well past the time when he should be at work. Evan is sleeping in the vibrating chair on the floor in the living room, and she is lying on the sofa , dozing lightly and occasionally waking long enough to feel guilty about not starting in on the laundry and dishes. She'll get to them soon enough. Morning is for lazing about in the sunshine, enjoying the fact that she is alive and whole, and her child is alive and whole, and her husband…well that they are all alive, and whole. She has tonnes of things to do, not the least of which is prepping herself to return to work, something to which she is, after three long months, looking forward in a reluctant manner.

Jack's keys jingle in the door and he comes in with a minimum of fuss, just slips in through the smallest crack he can make before pocketing his keys and crossing the room. His eyes search for Evan and find him, and his shoulders seem to relax, as if he had been strangely worried. She doesn't even bother to move. Some part of her thinks of The Great Gatsby and its women in white lounging listlessly in the heat, dying of ennui.

'Well, you're here,' she says, wanting to say, _Why are you here?_ but knowing that's not even really the question.

Jack smiles and kneels down by the sofa, burying his face in her neck. 'Ianto needs clothes. He's starkers at the Hub. I think he might have been relegated to a pair of medical scrubs, and we all know how that makes him feel.' His arm slings over her shoulders.

Lisa smiles. Ianto forgetting extra clothes at the Hub is one of his pet peeves. She imagines him slamming things about, burning the coffee beans, swearing under his breath at the monitors. Ianto in a bad mood is a passive-aggressive something to behold. She raises a hand and runs it through Jack's hair. He smells like Jack, whatever that is, those pheromones and some sort of hair wax that Ianto and he have been using, something that smells like flowers. Manly flowers, Jack would tell her.

'Oh, then I'd better not keep you,' she says, 'Himself will be wanting proper raiment.' And they both chuckle. Lisa loves Ianto's suits; he'd been wearing one the first time she'd met him, and the cuts might have changed, but Ianto's posture in them hasn't. And she loves a man who wears cloth like a costume. Her fingers travel down Jack's coat arm.

The baby makes a snorting noise and they both look over.

'Ianto thinks you'll leave because of—'

'Yeah, let's not get into that,' Jack says.

Lisa can feel his mouth on her neck, and the sensation isn't unpleasant. 'Oh, then, you're here for clothes?' She starts to get up, but he doesn't move, his weight on her shoulders and his hair tickling her face as he breathes, as if he has fallen asleep. She wonders if his eyes are closed.

'I'm not a talker, Lis.'

Now she really does have to roll her eyes, because that is so very _true but not_.

Instead she says, 'I know. Still.'

Jack lifts his head and stares at her, just stares at her, his eyes darting back and forth across her eyesight. His arms are lead on her shoulder. The sun cuts behind him, and he blocks it with his head.

'Marry me,' he says.

She shakes her head. 'Taken.'

Jack sighs. 'I'll marry him too,' he says, rolling his eyes, breaking what could have been romantic if he hadn't just proposed to a married woman. 'I'll ask him, and he'll say yes, you know he will.'

That's what she's afraid of.

'Bullshit,' she says, slapping his arm from her captive space below.

Jack laughs, free, easy, more regret than before, and now this time she knows that she is the cause of some of it. 'What do we have to do? Sign some papers, whatever, legal documents, blah blah blah. None of that means anything.' He winks. 'I'll put another ring on your finger, and you can have fun explaining it to strangers when they ask.'

Lisa pretends to consider. 'That would be fun at parties,' she muses.

Jack bends down then, brushing his nose against hers and then he kisses her, hullo, rather soundly, and that is lovely. She's obviously just along for the ride, she realises, as he steers the kiss like he drives—breakneck, haphazard, just a touch in a hurry. When he is done, he bites his way down her neck, mumbling into her skin.

'We'll put the baby to bed, and then tonight I'll marry you, in front of Ianto and everything. I'll wear white, just for you.'

The idea of Jack in white makes her shiver. White, virginal.

She unbuttons her blouse, because she can feel her breasts throbbing with letdown; this happens from time to time and now she feels impossibly full, sore with it. Her fingers fumble on the buttons, and Jack's hand takes over, giant fingers working where hers could not, opening the damp material, unhooking the bra up at the nursing clasp so that her breast, her dark nipple is framed in a circle of white. He plants sloppy spit kisses down her sternum until he can latch on to her breast, full to hardness, a small moan coming from the back of his throat.

Jack's mouth is hungry, and she would chastise him that there is another mouth that needs it more, but she alternates breasts anyway, so she closes her eyes and listens as Jack suckles from her full breast, licking and rubbing with his chin, his teeth pulling at her nipple. His free hand slides down the open length of her shirt to slip into her denims, bypassing the panties and tugging at her pubic hair before finding her clit and running one fingertip down it. He skips her cunt and pushes further, to where she is newly scarred from where they had cut her, cut her, she says, to make the way for Ianto's big-headed child. She smiles at the thought even as she reaches for Jack's face, bringing her hands into his hair like she does when the baby is nursing.

Jack's eyes open then, and something in her heart skips a little. He sucks harder, swallowing her down, tongue and teeth working, his nose breathing hard against her skin. His fingers massage her scar, and the action of it makes her let down more, her other breast leaking through her bra, into her shirt.

She wants to find his trousers. She wants to open his belt and hold him, but he won't let her, batting her hand away, taking it up to his chest and crushing it in his grip as if they are dancing, in that casual way he has when they move across the floor.

'Jack,' she says finally. But like before, she doesn't have anything to add.

He stares at her, and she has to push her finger in between his mouth and her breast to release the suction. Even then, he licks around the areola, cleaning off his spit and her milk, anything that might remain before he finally pulls the nursing bra back up, hooks it into place, and then withdraws his hand from her denims, licking the fingers clean before he buttons her shirt and rests his head on her breast.

Lisa watches the cleanup act in mild amusement.

'I can't stop,' he tells her then. 'You always have to tell me when to stop.'

Ah, here, she has something to say. 'I'll always tell you when to stop.'

*~*~*~*~*~*

IANTO

Jack is standing out in front of the building when Ianto gets there.

He is still fully dressed, though his shirt has blood on it; Gwen had sent him home first because they hadn't wanted to look at it, at the bullet holes that had blossomed on the fabric like flowers when Jack had died. Every time he does it, takes the bullet or the lightning, or the knife, Ianto frets, not because he is worried that Jack won't come back, but because every time Jack dies he draws back a little more, for a day, for a week, sometimes, draws into himself. Ianto cannot ask him what it feels like, because he's been shot; he knows what that feels like. And he doesn't want to know what dying feels like.

Well, actually, he does, he really does, but he doesn't want Jack to know that he does, because that will just make him sad.

Ianto palms his keys and shoulders the messenger bag that is full of a few things that he wants to shuffle about this evening and hadn't felt like doing at the Hub. He is thinking that he might have just enough time to tuck Evan into bed, read him The Littlest Rugby Player or whatever his favorite is this week, and then he might slouch at the table with a bottle and play with the plans that Gwen has drawn up.

'What are you doing?' he asks, because Jack doesn't move when he sees Ianto. Just blinks a few times as if he is surprised to see him.

Jack smiles wanly. 'She threw me out,' he says, laughing, but his smile is weak. 'I was going to go back to the Hub, but then I thought I might go to the clubs, and then I thought—' he stops. 'So I'm standing here,' he finishes. His hands clench and unclench, residual anger from the remembered argument undoubtedly tightening his jaw.

Ianto sighs and grabs his hand, pulling him to the doors. 'Come on, then,' he says, because he needs to make this better, and he will. And they will let him.

Jack leans against the wall of the lift. 'She threw a plate at me,' he tells Ianto, eyes wide. Ianto smiles to himself, and at Jack, to show him that it is all right.

'Congratulations. You must have really stropped her. Last time she threw dishes at me was, hrm. London.'

Jack sighs then, his hand in Ianto's is limp and uncrushing, not like normal. Ianto examines his face for lines, his hair for gray. A little at the temples. He stares at their reflection in the mirror wall of the lift: his own hair is a little lighter than it used to be, not gray at all, but unmistakably lighter. Sometimes Ianto wonders if he will some day wake up blond.

When the doors to the lift open, Jack exits first, though with a little of that naughty schoolboy shuffle in his step, and Ianto follows him, his finger running across the penthouse's 'LOVE SHACK' label, now five years worn.

The broken dishes are still on the floor, probably right where they had fallen when they had hit the wall. Lisa being a dish thrower had been somewhat of a surprise when it had first happened to him, years ago. He understands the action somewhat, but resents the clean up.

Jack walks past the sofa, where Lisa is snoring and Evan is curled inward in front of her. Ianto hears him turn off the telly and then wait, as if the cessation of noise will rouse them both. Ianto waits for it with him, but nothing happens. Lisa can be a heavy sleeper, and Evan has inherited that from her, which is good, because there is a lot of movement in the house after he goes to bed.

There is a squeak as Jack accidentally kicks something vaguely Thomas the Tank Engine related, and Ianto shakes his head as he gets the juice pitcher from the fridge and pours them glasses. It's flu season again, and he doesn't want to be ill. Besides, after this ministration, he's having a beer. Maybe three. He hasn't decided. By the time Jack joins him, he's halfway through his glass.

'I'd ask what happened, but I'm not sure I want to know,' he says softly.

Jack takes the glass from him and shrugs. 'She thinks I threw her birth control away.'

Ianto cocks his head then. Jack is looking at the glass with mistrust. 'Did you?'

'Maybe.'

Ianto sighs. 'You did not.'

'You're right, I didn't.' Jack sips from the glass and shrugs. 'But then I said, "Well, would that really be so bad, anyway?"' and when Ianto winces and starts to shake his head, he gives him a weak smile. 'Yeah, my brain was on auto pilot.' His fingers come to rest on his chest, one of them poking through a hole ringed with dried blood. 'I wasn't thinking.' He chugs his juice and makes a face. 'Grapefruit is nasty.'

Ianto takes the glass from him. 'Change the shirt,' he says, because he doesn't want Jack to dwell. He'll turn it over and over and over, and before Ianto and Lisa know it, he's made some decision without them, and that always goes over well. 'Just throw it away.'

When he says that, Jack understands that what he means is everything attached to that shirt must go, because nothing good is attached to it. Ianto cannot repair bullet holes, nor would he want to. The holes that had been the most critical are gone.

Jack blinks at him and pulls the hole in the shirt so that it rips a few inches, and Ianto wonders if he's going to try to tear it off like some sort of wrestling character, perhaps the Incredible Hulk. Instead, Jack smiles and fires a finger gun at him before looking shocked that he's just fired a finger gun, and then pads away, down the hallway in his sock-clad feet.

The fridge hums when he opens it, pulling out three bottles, two for him, one for Jack, and he tiptoes past the sofa, only to stand at the foot of it and watch Lisa and Evan's quiet breathing.

Evan is going to be a tall boy, Ianto thinks when he looks at his lean figure curled into Lisa. Three years have seen him shoot up like a rocket, gangly limbs and a mop of brown curls on his head and brown skin that tans even darker in the sun. He likes running and stealing biscuits and laughing and going down the slides backwards. Ianto thinks it's odd that Evan even has likes and dislikes, that he can and does tell them things. Lisa had told him that three-year-olds (according to the book; they need the book, as they are both hopeless. Lisa doesn't remember being a child, and Ianto doesn't want to even consider his own childhood as a template for raising his son. Jack rattles off what he knows, but then reminds them that he's going off seventies knowledge here) are usually capable of sentences, of completing narratives, or interacting and asking and apparently, screaming and in general being bratty.

Ianto has already caught himself several times thinking of putting Evan over his knee. They had agreed that they wouldn't do that, and the urge makes his fingers twitch. When he admits it one evening, Jack smiles and tells him that the fact that he hadn't is evidence enough that he's learning. Then Jack had played the, "the last time I was a parent, they had dinosaurs for real and we ate the bark off trees" game.

Ianto smiles at the sleeping figures on the sofa, and he's lost in thought when Jack comes from behind and rests his chin on Ianto's shoulder.

'You never warned me that she was a dish thrower,' he says. Ianto turns so that he can wrap one arm around Jack's waist, the hand with the bottles. He presses their coldness against the small of Jack's back, and the man jumps before shaking his head. 'Bastard.'

'I never actually thought you would give her cause to throw—' he squints at the broken crockery—' is that the fondue pot?'

Jack smirks. 'If we had a fondue pot, don't you think we would have used it by now?'

Ianto cannot argue with that. They do like things that slather and are easily licked off skin. Add heat to it and well, there is a reason they have Evan. And that Lisa is on the pill. 'Good point. _My_ point is that you are the good one. I am the bad one. Justice, it seems for being the good cop at work, I suppose,' he sighs.

Jack's eyes dance over the figures on the sofa; whatever is moving through his head is not good. More bullet fragments maybe, slow and heavy psychological sludge. Ianto reaches out with his other hand and taps Jack's forehead. 'Let it out.'

Jack sighs into Ianto's hand when it drags down the side of his face, and it is wistful. 'It always feels as if I'm waiting for an axe to fall,' he says, his eyes riveted to Lisa and Evan. 'Does it feel like that to you?'

Ianto's stomach coils a little, because that's it. That's been it since Evan had been born, since Lisa had got pregnant, actually, since the Doctor had taken them away. He isn't even sure now if he can say that, not out loud. Or if that will be the thing that drives Jack away. Or maybe it will be age. Or boredom, or one too many nights of temper tantrums. Or maybe it just won't be fun enough anymore. Jack will see Ianto and his gray hair, and Lisa's sagging breasts and think, _I can do so much better_.

Obviously Ianto knows what shape the other shoe looks like, the one he's waiting to drop: Jack's boot heel as he goes out the door. Huh.

He must have taken too long to react, because Jack reaches up to grab that hand and press it to his mouth. 'You know, there are a species of aliens, in the system of Nak.'

Ianto figures that this is going to be an object lesson of some kind and takes it in stride.

'To them, an individual become more attractive the older he or she gets.'

Ianto rolls his eyes and gestures to the sliding door, because if they are going to talk this long, they should do it outside. He thinks about the work he told Gwen he'd do, and then he realises that he's not quite that interested in it. Something about Torchwood isn't as fascinating.

He's not ready to do something else, not quite, and he has no idea what he might do, but Lisa has already quit UNIT, and her job at the florists', whilst not as financially or intellectually stimulating as what she used to do, allows her to manage Evan, to see him grow up, she says. Jack thinks that the florists' suits her, Lovely Lily Lisa, bringing home bundles of chrysanthemums and daylilies to run across their skin in the dead of night, blindfolded, or trussed, waiting for her hands and the kiss of a few petals along their legs and cocks.

Ianto settles in the wire chair and opens the first beer with his churchkey, flipping the cap into a coffee can that they have for that purpose. It rings hollow, to remind him of how little he does this these days. Jack follows suit and sips from his beer with a grimace. Ianto wonders if he could just put the paperwork away for the night and get drunk. He could have a few too many and blow Jack out here in the crisp autumn air.

But first, 'So, today's little incident with firearms has bothered you,' he says, 'because you don't normally make a habit of bear-baiting.'

Jack rubs the bottle across his forehead, then glances out at the lights of the air tower that had been built last year to ward off low flying planes, the tower whose lights flicker red, on and off. Red for danger. 'Sometimes I want to forget,' he says, apropos of nothing, or something. 'When it happens, I wake up and I think, "I would really like to not remember that".' He smiles at Ianto. 'I've lost count with it all, and I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing. When did I stop counting?'

'I don't know. Memories are important,' Ianto says, 'but maybe some things are made to be forgotten.'

Jack frowns at his bottle then, turning it on the table. 'It's funny, all the memories I erase for other people, and I can't even manage to hold onto the ones I want to remember.'

Ianto makes a concerted effort to drink a large portion of his beer before asking the next obvious question. 'Why would you want to remember them, then? All those deaths?'

Jack glances at him. He opens his mouth as if he is about to speak, but he doesn't. His one arm rests on the tabletop, and he slouches in his chair, petulant. Ianto likes Jack petulant, because it usually means that he has lost his argument. On the other hand, they hadn't been arguing, had they?

The gulls they have never managed to scare away dance on the railing. Ianto sighs for all the shite he's going to have to clean up over the weekend. At least he can just hose the area down. He finishes his beer and desperately waits for the warm glow of it to suffuse him, but it is slow going. He opens the second and amends his plans from earlier: he's going to get drunk and fuck Jack over the balcony. He recalls that at one time he had refused to even come out here without clothes on, and now he's going to pound Jack into the terrace.

Well, maybe.

'They're all I have,' Jack says.

Now he does have to roll his eyes. 'Oh, please, bullshite,' he moans, and makes a wanking gesture with his hand. 'Tell me more, Captain Jack Melodrama.'

Jack's mouth quirks a little, but he doesn't look at Ianto. 'That wasn't what I meant. They're the only constant.'

'Ah.'

Jack looks at him. 'Don't you ever worry about not remembering things?'

Ianto cannot answer that, because he has a whole swath of memories that he would like to forget. Or maybe those memories make him what he is. They are painful, and he realises upon thinking about them—Lisa's legs and the attack and more than several panicking moments in between then and now, coupled with his near-death by alien flu and the slow decline he'd made—that he couldn't trade them because they make him who he is in some ways. He cannot and will not forget, even though UNIT had asked him and Lisa if they wanted to, way back, so far back in the whole story of his life with Torchwood that Jack hadn't been more than a footnote.

That is capitulating, then. 'I suppose then, that yes…' he says to Jack, fading away when he realises what Jack is driving at. 'In some way yes, memory is identity-forming.' He has yet to understand what this has to do with Jack being upset that he cannot remember how many times he's been electrocuted or drowned like a kitten. Or they could just be speaking hypothetically. He looks at his second beer with doubt; they aren't that strong.

'It's all we have,' Jack says then, his eyes looking at the sky, almost dancing across the stars as if he is counting them, making sure they are all there. 'Even me. I might live forever, right?' Ianto hears the edge in his voice, it's almost like a laugh. 'But how long can I hold a memory? When I don't remember it might as well have not happened.'

Ianto rests his chin on his hand and stares at the lights out on the horizon: red, red, red, red. 'That's comforting.'

Jack snorts. 'I'm terrified.' He sits forward and turns the bottle in his hand. 'There. I said it. I'm fucking terrified.' The cuss lands like a slap, because Jack doesn't use them.

Ianto drinks the first half of the second beer and wishes that he had a fortifying shot. 'I'm afraid that some day you're going to remember that you are young and fit and gorgeous, and we'll see your back for the last time,' he blurts out. Just saying it makes him queasy and relieved, not unlike being the one lone voice of reason at the conference table at work, when Gwen and Jack are shouting at each other and Ravi is asleep and Claire, their new medic, is looking at everyone as if they are insane.

'Left field, Ianto,' Jack says, gritting his teeth.

Ianto grinds his own jaw. The night had so much potential, and now. 'Pertinent, whilst we speak of things that _fucking terrify_ us.'

Jack sits back. 'You have seriously been worrying about this.'

Ianto finishes his beer, and his stomach feels too full. He should have gone for harder spirits instead—more intoxication, less liquid. He slams the bottle back down a little too forcefully, and the caps rattle in the can. 'Jesus Christ, Jack, how can you not think about it? How can you watch us get older and just, _not_ , and not think about it? Or think that I wouldn't? That Lisa wouldn't?' He slouches further and winces when his belt catches on the wire in the back of the chair.

Jack runs his palms up and down the arms of his chair.

Ianto tilts his head back and looks at the stars. In the distance there is the blaring of a horn. He feels better for having said all of it, but now he wants to tie things together. 'I'm just being realistic,' he says. 'What, are you going to take care of all of us in our old age, masquerading as our son, our grandson?' He rights his head and whoosh, the alcohol hits his bloodstream like a piledriver, and it's nice, just soothing enough that he knows it's there, just strong enough to unmoor the rest of what he wants to say. 'How old will I have to be before you won't look at me anymore? Before you won't want to fuck me anymore?'

Jack closes his eyes and smiles. Then he laughs, and Ianto narrows his eyes to focus on him. Jack rubs his face with his fingers, leaning forward, massaging his temples before scrubbing his cheeks with his palms and snorting, no, laughing, really laughing.

'It wasn't meant to be funny.' Ianto realises that now he's the petulant one. Maybe Jack will be fucking him over the terrace. That's not such a bad idea, either, now that he stops to think about it.

'That you think,' Jack says into his hands, 'with all you know about what I find attractive, beautiful, sexy, even, that I would stop wanting you, or her or Gwen, or Estelle or anyone, because of age.' He snorts and turns his head to look Ianto in the eye. 'It's ridiculous.'

Ianto still has doubts, but it's not worth arguing. Only time will solve this riddle, right? He looks instead at Jack, with his gray hairs and his v-neck vest and his massive hands. Jack, with his braces down and his sock feet out here on the patio, not caring that the bottoms will be black when he goes in. Jack who had taken him in, even when he hadn't wanted to, when UNIT had called, who had taken him on, when Lisa had insisted, who had given him away for one moment, one week, when he had thought that he might never get him back, even if it had saved his life.

Jack, who had stayed for nine months of vomit and bitching and midnight runs to Tesco's for frozen yogurt; Jack, who before that had taken Ianto's fragile ego and taught him how to be a husband in some ways, how to ask for things that he wanted.

Jack, who no longer even bothers with his own room. Jack who—

Ianto sighs. 'All right then. But don't throw Lisa's pills away,'

'Gah, she can't stay mad at this face.' He points to his jaw, and Ianto silently prays that he doesn't do the "always yearned for" line. Jack's eyes light up for a split second. Mischievous. Old Jack. 'The Feltians of Banaz 5 have wrinkles like a sharpei. They use the folds to—'

Ianto lifts a hand. 'Fine. No seriously, don't go there.'

Jack doesn't. Instead he laughs, and it is fine.

 

*~*~*~*~*~*

GWEN

It's rare that she gets a moment to herself in the Hub. Usually someone else is here: Claire, or Jamil, the man they'd hired after Ravi had, well, imploded would have been too kind. Gwen doesn't like to dwell. It doesn't do. And she has that new one, Lois Habiba coming in. Lois is a little old for a field agent, but then again, so is Gwen, really (Not that thirty-nine is old, but action takes its toll, and she clicks at the knees when she climbs the stairs to her office.). And she's actually interviewing for Ianto's job, and Gwen is fairly sure that she can do that, minus the fieldwork. What they really need is Ianto's masterful organisational eye.

Gwen settles in the chair and adjusts the lamp. She doesn't quite like it, the green glass shade, but it is part of the room, and she hasn't the balls to replace anything, not yet, not whilst Jack is still here and right now sitting across from her at the front end of what used to be his desk, but is now hers. She wonders how many blowjobs the chair her arse is currently in has supported. Legion, perhaps.

Jack sits back in the chair and smiles. His eyes wrinkle in the corners. It's been a little less than ten years, really, since she first met him, but the signs of age are there, just a little. Gwen wonders if in three hundred years Jack will be wizened and old and have to live the rest of eternity like that. Not appealing at all. She never asks, because she wouldn't want to talk about it either.

He reaches out for an apple on her desk and takes it. 'Someone has the hots for teacher,' he sings.

Gwen gestures that he can have it, and he huffs his breath on the red skin. 'It was in my lunch. Rhys packed it.'

Jack polishes the apple on the front of his shirt, as if it needs it. 'So, here we are, Gwen Cooper, ma'am.' He bites the apple, a deep, gluttonous bite, really, and uses the fruit itself to catch the juice that comes from it, scraping the hollow of it up his chin before twisting it away and chewing. For one second she catches a glimpse of the tip of his tongue and he raises his eyebrows.

'Are you doing the right thing?' she asks him, searching his face for a sign that he isn't sure, but he just winks and swallows before speaking. Lisa has finally pressed table manners on him. Somewhat—he gestures with the apple and juice flings from it onto her papers on her desk.

'I'm definitely not sure I'm doing the right thing. Are you doing the right thing? Is Ianto? Lisa? Was Ravi doing the right thing?' He pauses and considers. 'Owen did the right thing. Suzie—well, okay, sometimes we strike out.'

Gwen shakes her head and rests it on her folded hands. 'I will miss you. It'll be like all my best friends left at once.'

There is a long stretch of time in which Jack turns the apple in his hands, revolving and red and temptation itself. Gwen has always loved Jack's hands. 'You know, we had mentioned.' His eyes flit up to hers.

Gwen sighs. 'Oh, no. We had our misspent youth,' she says, and his eyes brighten as he sets the apple on her desk, one perfect bite taken from it. 'Rhys and I are happy with our twenty-first century ways.'

Some part of her is dying to go with them, some small part of her that is still thirty inside, that is still adventurous and free and unbound. That person lives inside her heart and wants her old friends forever. That person wants many things. Another part of her wants to pack up her whole family and move with them. They could buy a commune up north. Make cheese. Everyone loves cheese.

But her real self knows that Torchwood is something she wants, something she does, and that she couldn't give it up. She's been blessedly lucky in her life, in her career, and she wants to keep it that way, stay alive for her kids, but she can't bring herself to turn away yet. Maybe some day. There's still more for her to do here.

Jack needs to go. She's more than eager to push him out the door, because he shouldn't be here anymore. Someday he'll be back; she'll set it up, and in sixty years, maybe more or less, Jack will stroll back in the door and say, 'I'm Captain Jack Harkness. Put me to work.' Because he will, he always will. Constant as the Northern…well.

That grandfather clock rings, quarter to three, and Jack smiles at her. They have named the phantom clock, which had graduated from ticking to ringing a few years ago, Myfanwy, in her honor. Ianto's only comment had been that at least a phantom clock wouldn't leave piles of guano everywhere.

Jack runs his hand through his hair and sighs. 'I wasn't looking for it, you know. When it all fell into my lap. I was waiting for the Doctor.' He snorts and rubs the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger, uncrosses and re-crosses his legs. Shifts his weight from one side of the chair to the other. 'They just—' He waves his hands.

Gwen is the last person in the world he needs to explain Ianto and Lisa to.

'I know,' she says, 'so go. Give them my love and I'll see you on holidays.'

Jack jumps to his feet, as if he has been waiting for this sign the whole conversation, and she realises that he has. It's not his office anymore, he's not in charge anymore, and hasn't been for a while. A gift he gave to her, albeit a dubious one. Gwen stands with him, and he rounds the desk to crush her in an embrace and give her a kiss that stirs more than a few memories, and then he's gone, his coral tucked under his arm, off to where Ianto and Lisa and the kids are probably packing up the last of the house. Ianto had said his good-byes at the dinner party Thursday night, but Jack has held out for a few more days, cataloging as much of the alien tech as he could before it is time to simply step back, set it all down, and walk away.

She doesn't know exactly what they plan on doing, though Ianto has said that they'll be in touch, and of course, Gwen could follow them by multiple means. And maybe she will, just so that she doesn't feel so lonely.

She pushes away from her desk and thinks about calling Rhys, telling him that she wants to go out to dinner, but then she thinks about the mess kids make in restaurants and realises that all she wants is a night in front of the telly with them all, watching something inane and funny. Maybe they'll make popcorn and let the kids stay up late.

But for now she has an interview, and soon Jamil will be along to read her the latest budgetary figures, and if she wants to leave at any good time, she had better get a move on.

Jack shrugs on his coat and stands in the centre of the Hub, looking at everything once, as if his eyes are scanning the place into memory. Maybe they are. Gwen smiles at him from the upper railing, and he salutes her, turns, and opens the door for Lois Habiba.

'Oh!' Lois says, holding her hand out to Jack, 'I'm Lois Habiba! Am I late? They said fifteen hundred—'

Jack laughs, kisses her hand, and glances at Gwen. 'Lois, you are right on time. I'm on my way out.' One more look then, like he can't help himself. 'Gwen Cooper, you be good.'

'If not, I'll be better,' she whispers as she comes down the steps, and the door closes behind him before her feet hit the ground level.

'Oh, I'm Lois Habiba.' Gwen already likes her handshake. Lois may be thirty-five, but she comes highly recommended from Mister Frobisher. She trained under Bridget Spears, the old battleaxe. Gwen likes her and her smart suit on sight. She knows that she's going to hire Ms. Habiba, but even as they greet each other and exchange pleasantries, she can't help but look away, to the window in the metal door, and Jack's back through the glass as he moves farther and farther away from Torchwood, and towards the things that have saved him from it.

***

 _'How did it go so fast?' we'll say as we are looking back.  
And then we'll understand, we hold gold dust in our hands._  
\--(Tori Amos, 'Gold Dust')

END

**Author's Note:**

> AUTHOR'S NOTE: I don't know where this came from. I might have started it before CoE, I might not have. I might have started it in that interim period in which I was petulant about CoE. I dunno. And then I was like, 'well, write a poly fic'. And then someone said that they wanted to see a fic where Jack walks away from it all, intact, whole, with his lover, in triumph, really, and I was like, 'I can do that.' AND THEN, someone said that they wanted to see Ianto meet Jack's daughter in a good way, and Ianto's family meet Jack in a good way, and it started to get ridic, and I figured in for a penny, in for a pound.
> 
> I am aware that it's too long, and it's very hurt/comfort, and it's got a baby in it. Those might be its flaws. I kind of like it that way. I'm not interested in talking about how it could be better, or whatever. So there you go. It's sweet and strange, and I loved it, and that's all I got. If you didn't like it, for whatever reason, that is fine, but I felt like I had to do this, in some ways, and so. Hrm.


End file.
